Chicago Sends Black Dads to Jail

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

For parents navigating family court in Cook County, falling behind on child support and other court-ordered payments can carry consequences that extend far beyond mounting debt.

It can mean going to jail.

Over the past decade, more than 2,500 people — nearly all of them men — have been locked up after Cook County judges found them in what’s called indirect civil contempt.

Most were detained for failing to comply with court-ordered payments to children or former spouses, according to Cook County sheriff’s records.

Those jailed spent an average of eight days in custody. But about 100 people were held for 50 days or longer. Of them, about 25 were locked up for more than 100 days, according to sheriff’s data from April 2016 to the end of March 2026.

One man, Steve Fanady, has been in jail for nearly four years.

A Chicago Sun-Times analysis of sheriff’s records exposes what some say is a punitive side of a system that civil rights advocates and some court observers say offers little legal help to those unable to afford a lawyer.

Unlike criminal defendants, people accused of violating support orders in civil court aren’t automatically entitled to legal representation even though they might face incarceration.

In Cook County’s sprawling domestic relations court system — which handles roughly 40,000 divorce and child-support cases each year — advocates estimate that at least half of the litigants come to court without a lawyer. Most are Black.

For nearly add debts, jail is not a possibility. A debtor can declare bankruptcy.

It is not so well known that child support is not required to be spent on the child. The mom can spend it as she pleases. In many or even most of these cases, the debt is not even to the mom, but to a welfare agency.

NY Times Targets College Student for Views

The NY Times spent years promoting The 1619 Project, where a Black woman argued that America was founded as a White supremacist nation.

Now the paper has a big story complaining that a White college student expressed similar ideas in a class paper:

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. ...

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.” Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.” At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class.

It says he also posted some online offensive comments, but did not link to any.

I searched, and here is his paper on the Constitution Article V and 14A. A law professor evaluates the latter paper, and says that it is pretty good.

Here is his most offensive tweet:

My position on Jews is simple: whatever Harvard professor Noel Ignatiev meant by his call to “abolish the White race by any means necessary” is what I think must be done with Jews. Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.

Now that the NY Times has targeted him, he has been suspended from the university.

It is absurd that the NY Times targets this student in this way. He is entitled to his opinions. We do not know if there are really his opinions, as class papers and tweets are often deliberately provocative to try to defend a peculiar view.

There are indeed two views about American founding. One says that it was a grand egalitarian experiment, open to all. The other says that it was only for White Christians. If we are going to let people express one view, we should also allow the other.

The paper does not rebut either side, but apparently the topic is so toxic that people get fired for any views on it.

One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.

Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.

This is pretty crazy. Lawyers are trained to argue views that are not necessarily their own, in order to defend a client. We are not supposed to care about the personal views of a lawyer. Only that he advocates in behalf of the client.

Example of Terrible American Divorce Case

Want to see a sample of what is wrong with American divorce courts? See A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave.

Problems include judges with way too much discretion. Expensive psychologists whose worthless opinions carry weight. Bogus domestic violence charges used to gain legal advantage. High transfer payments, even though both parents have money. Adopted kid treated worse than genetic kids. Nannies take sides. Kids coerced into lying to activate CPS.

The kicker in this case is that the battles did not end with the wife committing assisted suicide. She left videos that got millions of views.

Law Tests are Racist, says Court

News:

The Washington State Supreme Court decided the bar exam is no longer required to become a lawyer in the state. Their reason? The bar exam is racist, which they say “disproportionately and unnecessarily blocks historically marginalized groups from entering the practice of law.”

At the height of the extremist Black Lives Matter movement, the court-appointed the Bar Licensure Task Force to provide alternative ways to earn a law license. As they were trained to do, they found the Washington State bar exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming attorneys. ...

Task force members declared the bar exam racist and classist because of how it’s written and the impact they think it has on who becomes a lawyer. ...

Indeed, the task force complains that the Washington State Bar Association is 83% white and 56% male. This is proof, they believe, of racism and bias in the licensing process and “specifically the character and fitness inquiry.”

The Washington state supreme court has nine judges, and only one White male.

Almost a Billion Dollars for One Physician's Behavior

NPR Radio reports:

USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee have agreed to pay a $380 million settlement to hundreds of survivors of sexual abuse by former team doctor Larry Nassar. ...

The deal grew out of a bankruptcy filing by USA Gymnastics in 2018, with a federal judge in Indiana approving the settlement Monday afternoon. ...

It is a defeat for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and USA Gymnastics who spent over $100,000,000 in legal fees,

This is in addition to a $500 million settlement from Michigan State University.

One of the claimants was Simone Biles, who was recently Time magazine sportsman of the year. Time praised her for quitting some Olympic events in order to preserve her mental health.

This is all very fishy. How could defense lawyers burn this much money? What will the plaintiffs lawyers get, $200 million?

This settlements are based on a theory that Michican State and USA Gymnastics somehow knew that Nassar was a child molester, and encouraged his crimes. However that seems very unlikely, as no one anywhere approves of physicians molesting underage girls.

I wonder how much of this case has been driven by lawyers sniffing deep pockets.

Law professor brags about her weirdo mothering

It is amazing what Jews promote as maternal values.

The NY Times published an op-ed by a divorced Jewish law professor who brags that in 2013 she abandoned her children in favor of freeing a black man from prison.

The kids weren't really abandoned, as they have a father, but he is another Jewish lawyer who is probably also pretending that dismantling the White society is a virtue.

I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids
I love them beyond all reason. But sometimes my clients need me more. ...

My son was one of the last children to speak. He stood up and, in a clear voice, said: “I appreciate my parents for being lawyers because they get people out of jail. ...”

This is sick. At the same time, the author's sister, Emily Bazelon, another Jewish lawyer writer, was on PBS TV News supporting wild and unsubstantiated against Donald Trump and others. She had no mention of the possibility that he might be innocent, and seemed only concerned about the accusers feeling bad because their stories are questioned.

It is obvious that these feminist women have no actual concern for innocence or justice. They are just working to promote their political agendas.

RT reports:

Whether one agrees with Trump’s idea to build a wall on the US-Mexico border or not, “he is at least looking for a solution,” Putin said, while the proponents of the so-called liberal values are “not doing anything,” insisting that everything is just fine even as unprecedented numbers of migrants come across their borders.

"So, the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population."

The same thing is happening in Europe, the Russian president said, noting that other leaders he spoke with saying nothing can be done because there are laws.

“Well, change the laws!” he said.

Putin is right. The liberal idea has had a gone run, but now it is in conflict with the interests of the people.

The regular NY Times opinion columnists are not supposed to reveal their voting preferences, but usually it is obvious anyway. David Brooks has somehow made a second career pretending to represent Republicans on PBS TV and NPR Radio. They frequently have two guests giving political commentary, implying that one is the Democrat and one is the Republican. When asked about whether he is a Republican, he would coyly say that the NY Times does not allow him to say.

Today Brooks writes:

I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?

Apparently he is much more in agreement with Trump than the Democrat candidates.

So why does he hate Trump? I have read dozens of his columns on the subject, and here is the best explanation I can see. Trump is Jewish, and the tribe has made a collective decision to do everything to undermine Trump. Brooks is far too much of a dishonest creep to say this explicitly, but he fails to give any coherent arguments against Trump either.

It is not even that Trump ever does anything contrary to the Jews. But Jews like Brooks and the NY Times management firmly believe that the Jews should control politicians, and they don't control Trump. So they hate him.

Mueller is just a puppet

Up to now, I had assumed that Robert Mueller was firmly in control of his Trump investigation. I watched his only public statement about it, and I now think that he is a senile puppet.

The statement was so bizarre because (1) Mueller appeared to be senile, as he had a hard time reading a statement and was unable to answer any questions; (2) his factual findings completely exonerate President Trump; and (3) he nevertheless read a statement that insinuated that Trump might be guilty of something.

So who is the puppet-master?

Here is a 2017 story in the Jewish magazine Forward:

As Russia special counsel Robert Mueller hires more attorneys to help on the inquiry into the Trump White House, some members of the tribe are joining the team.

Among the Jews on the team are Andrew Goldstein, Aaron Zelinsky and Andrew Weissmann, all seasoned prosecutors from the Justice Department, according to a list of names from Talking Points Memo.

These Jews all have stereotypical Jewish leftist views, a history of unethical prosecutions, and alignment with the Democrat Party.

It is obvious now that these Jewish Trump-haters desperately tried for two years to find something that could be blamed on Trump. They didn't find anything, so now they are hoping that House Democrats will hold impeachment hearings to damage Trump with false charges.

The Mueller investigation found that the Putin government had no contact with Trump or anyone connected with his campaign. It was unable to confirm allegations that Russians tried to interfere with the 2016 election, or that any votes were improperly influenced towards Trump. It claimed that it could be a crime for Trump to conceal activities that were 100% lawful, but still found no grounds for charging him.

The main gripe against Trump is that the Jews thought that they could control the Presidency by controlling the news media. In 2016, about 95% of the news media expressed Jewish anti-Trump editorial opinions. The main exceptions were Hannity, Limbaugh, RT TV, RT.com, and WikiLeaks. The complaints against the Russians consist almost entirely of RT and WikiLeaks putting out info damaging to Hillary Clinton.

I could never figure out why all the political pundits at the NY Times, Wash Post, CNN, and other Jewish-dominated sites put so much stock in the Mueller investigation. It was obvious that if Mueller had evidence to incriminate Trump, he would have presented it two years ago.

While some people speculated that Mueller had a secret impeachment case against Trump, the Mueller team actually leaked all their evidence in advance. They produced several indictments, and each one was written to implicate Trump as much as possible. So the Mueller case against Trump was clear from those indictments. For example, Michael Cohen was induced to plead guilty to crimes that were not even crimes, just so Trump could be blamed for having a crooked lawyer.

Now it all makes sense. This investigation was run by Jews, using Jewish stooges, and promoted in the press by the Jewish news media.

The funny thing is that Trump is the most pro-Jewish President we have ever had. He has Jewish advisers, and he is consistently pro-Israel. But Jewish leftists hate him because they cannot control him the way that they control other politicians.

As I write this, some law professor woman on NPR Radio is arguing that William Barr's description of the investigation was "technically correct", but nonetheless misleading because Trump could be exonerated and still be impeached. It is funny how these supposed experts are eager to cite their expertise or someone else's expertise in saying that Trump did something wrong, and yet they don't say what Trump did that was wrong.

Meanwhile, Democrats are blaming Jews:

A draft resolution set to be debated this weekend at the California Democratic Party State Convention, obtained by Fox News, accuses the Israeli government of willfully "aligning with the virulent Islamophobia" of white supremacist groups in the U.S. -- and links Israel indirectly to the Oct. 2018 massacre of 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue. ...

Some of the draft resolutions would mandate that Democrat officials work to "nullify" President Trump's pro-Israel policies. One document directs party officials to take a subsidized trip to Israel only "if they undertake to devote an equal amount of time to visiting Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories."

I wonder how long the Jews will continue to bankroll the Democrats, unless the Democrats become more pro-Israel.

When lawyers discover deep pockets

News:

Michigan State University has agreed to a $500 million settlement with the hundreds of women and girls who say Larry Nassar sexually assaulted them, bringing to a close another aspect of the scandal now in its 20th month.

This case was always about the money.

If it were not for lawyers angling to get rich, I doubt that criminal charges would have ever been brought against Nassar. Maybe he would have been reprimanded by some medical board for some unorthodox treatments. But he has now been sentenced three times, with each one for more years than he could possibly live.

I didn't read the details of the allegations, except that parents often sat in on the medical exams and had no complaint at time. The complaints only came later, when they signed on with lawyers going for that $500M.

Michigan shared parenting

A Michigan lawyer writes:

Michigan House Bill 4691 would mandate shared custody of children in divorce cases with few exceptions. ...

This bill also presupposes that all parents are able to get along well enough to co-parent their children and that conflicts in a shared custody situation will be at a minimum. Most people divorce because they can’t get along and concur on parenting issues.

No, very few get divorced because of an inability to cooperate on parenting issues.

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers has come out against the recent legislative movement toward mandated shared custody in Michigan and other states,

Yeah, the divorce lawyers want to make money over custody disputes, instead of having custody rights codified by law.

Child custody arrangements should take into account the child’s best interest, first and foremost and forever. This bill does not.

The term "child’s best interest" is a euphemism for lawyers and judges overriding the wishes of the parents.

If we truly want to do something to encourage parents spending more time with their children -- as proponents of this bill claim is their goal-- we should eliminate any relationship between parenting time and money.

Currently in Michigan, the number of overnights a parent has with his or her children, very much drives the amount of child support paid. That is the worst legislation ever passed. It discourages parents who receive child support payments to be agreeable to their children spending more time with the other parent as it would diminish that support.

He finally writes something sensible. Not everyone knows this, but the laws in all 50 states create extreme financial incentive against sharing custody. The mom can get a whole lot more money by refusing to let the dad see the kids. That is what "child support" is all about, as it is currently implemented.

Parents should be encouraged to have their children spend time with both parents without a financial penalty or reward linked to it.

That is what a shared custody bill should do. Then there would be no reason to fight over custody or support in most cases, and divorce lawyers would not have much to do.

With the Child Custody Act of 1970, we have 47 years of case law giving judges guidance over a variety of child-related issues. To scrap that would an egregious error.

Each divorce is different and it is a mistake to mandate a cookie-cutter decision without careful consideration into the nuances of each family situation. Again, it is the child in child custody cases whose needs should be the priority, not a parent’s.

He is just saying that judges and lawyers should run the lives of kids, not their parents. We have 47 years of a system that is worse that what we had before.

A right-wing philosopher argues:

Parental rights and authority have been under scrutiny from some lefty liberals and and socialists recently (here’s an example). The concern is usually grounded in “children’s rights” and their autonomy, though there is also attention paid toward critiquing the basis for parental authority. I used to think parental authority is a given, but it seems as though “the left” is willing to challenge any traditional source of authority that is not the state itself. Conservatives should always pay close attention to philosophies and ideologies that dissolve or undermine non-state authorities, such as the family or religious institutions, because that is a mechanism on which totalitarianism depends. The idea is to slowly eliminate the authority of and allegiance to non-state institutions.

Consider this. Just a few days ago, the democratic socialist government of Alberta legislated that schools cannot inform parents whether their child is a member of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. It’s called Bill 24. The justification for this law, so far as I have heard, is that such information “outs” a child to his parents, which therefore can violate his privacy or is too great a risk for his safety. ...

Caring of children requires choosing particular goods and ends for children. But who gets to make those decisions? Plausibly, it’s either the parents or the state. If the state chooses for children, then parents would serve as mere bodily donors and custodians for the state. But that is perverse: The parent-child relationship is naturally much deeper and more intimate than that, as I argued earlier. Hence, it is not the state should choose, but the parents. Yet, if it is the parents who should choose, then they need a great deal of space to exercise their choices in accordance to their conscience, particularly within matters of education, sexuality and morality, for each is deeply consequential to the child’s identity, good and life trajectory. In fact, aside from providing the necessities of life, it is hard to think of a contribution more important to the life and good of a child than those aforementioned things.

Yes, right-wingers favor family autonomy, while left-wingers, lawyers, and judges seek to let the state make decisions for children.

How the lawyer party forces us into court

Here is an explanation for why we are overlawyered:

The United States is already the most litigious society in the world. We spend about 2.2 percent of gross domestic product, roughly $310 billion a year, or about $1,000 for each person in the country on tort litigation, much higher than any other country. This includes the costs of tort litigation and damages paid to victims. About half of this total is for transactions costs — mostly legal fees. ...

Law is the profession that’s best represented in the US Congress. ...

The theoretical consideration is that lawyer-legislators can, by deciding on statutory law, affect the very basis of their business and that this is particularly the case for tort law. A look at the raw data (figure below) indicates that lawyer-legislators are less likely to support reforms that restrict tort law than legislators with a different professional background. ...

Overall, the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that lawyer-legislators, at least in part, pursue their private interests when voting on tort issues. From a broader perspective, the results highlight the relevance of legislators’ identities and individual professional interests for economic policy making. ...

Though fewer than one in 200 Americans has a law licence, the profession can lay claim to a third of the current House of Representatives and to more than half the seats in the Senate.

For comparison, in both Britain’s House of Commons and its Canadian counterpart just one in seven members is a lawyer, and one in 15 deputies in the French Assemblée Nationale.

The article does not mention that the Democrat Party has become the lawyer party. The great majority of Democrat leaders, presidential candidates, cabinet secretaries, and advisors have been lawyers in recent years. Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the others are lawyers and primarily associate with lawyers. Most major Republicans have not been lawyers.

Being a lawyer if very corrupting to one's worldview. Obama and the Clintons have attitudes that they can do whatever they can get away with, and give very legalistic and evasive justifications when pressed.

Fear of DNA

Here is a crazy employee lawsuit that won a big award. The employer asked a couple of employees to take a DNA test solely to proved their innocence of some minor vandalism. No one was harmed. But Congress passed a stupid law on the subject, and it became a lawsuit. An ambulance-chasing-type lawyer brags:

Yesterday, in what U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg dubbed “the case of devious defecators,” jurors awarded $2.25 million dollars to Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds for the harm they suffered from having their DNA unlawfully obtained by their employers, Atlas Logistics Retail Services (Atlanta), LLC.

In this case of first impression, Judge Totenberg previously ruled that Atlas had unlawfully taken cheek swabs from the two employees under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (“GINA”), 42 U.S.C. § 2000ff-1(b), which makes it “an unlawful employment practice for an employer to request, require, or purchase genetic information with respect to an employee.” ...

The jury awarded Dennis Reynolds $225,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in compensatory damages to Jack Lowe. They also awarded a whopping $1,750,000 in punitive damages, to stop Atlas from requesting its employees’ DNA in the future, and to send a crystal clear message that they value the privacy of their DNA.

I never agreed with that law. People have a lot of irrational ideas about DNA.

Tom Brady was framed

Ted Wells is a black criminal lawyer who was famous for his poor defense of Scooter Libby. The case against Libby was very weak, as I posted several times, but Wells seemed to be throwing the case in order to create a scapegoat for the Bush administration.

Now Wells is better known for a couple of slanted reports for the NFL in order to support some stupid policies. The last one accuses Tom Brady of being 51% likely to have some general knowledge of some minor football inflation irregularities, but now it appears that Wells faked the data in his report.

I guess the NFL wants to show that it is tough on players. Or maybe it is an anti-union thing. Or people like to take down big stars. Or punishment becomes more respectable if you get a black lawyer to do the dirty work. I don't know.

This is another example of over-criminalizing sports, or inappropriate penalties, and of rejecting innocent-until-proven-guilty.

New Gladwell book is more junk

Psychology professor Christopher Chabris trashed a new book in a paywalled review:

Malcolm Gladwell too often presents as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior. ...

Mr. Gladwell enjoys a reputation for translating social science into actionable insights. But the data behind the surprising dyslexia claim is awfully slim. ...

The overarching thesis of "David and Goliath" is that for the strong, "the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness," whereas for the weak, "the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty." According to Mr. Gladwell, the secret of Mr. Boies's greatness is neither luck nor training. Rather, he got where he did because he was dyslexic.

I question whether David Boies is such a great lawyer, as he has famously lost some big cases. He lost Bush v Gore by arguing for a non-uniform recount, when a uniform recount might have won the election for his client. He lost Napster. He bungled the antitrust case against Microsoft by emphasizing embarrassing emails and failing to make arguments that would result in a meaningful remedy. Most recently he failed to convince the US Supreme Court that there was a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, even tho that seemed to be the belief of Kennedy and the four liberals.

Gladwell is famous for spreading a number of bad ideas, such as his 10,000 rule, debunked by a recent book on the sports gene (but Gladwell still defending it), and the value of reshirting. I posted below how a lot of people believe in academic redshirting, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Another review of Gladwell's new book points out evidence against athletic redshirting as well:

In his 2008 bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell famously identifies an “iron law of Canadian hockey: In any elite group of hockey players — the very best of the best — 40% of the players will have been born between January and March.” Gladwell explains this phenomenon through the relative age effect — the theory that Jan. 1 cut-off dates mean that kids born early in the year are bigger and stronger than those born later; the stronger kids make the team, practice more and the gap inexorably widens. So, if you want to produce the next Crosby, aim for January. Seems straightforward, right?

According to the sociologists Benjamin Gibbs, Jonathan Jarvis and Mikaela Dufur, it’s anything but. In a study published last year in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the trio argues that if you redefine “elite,” Gladwell’s theory crumbles. Gibbs and his team looked at Canadian-born players on NHL All-Star teams and Canadian Olympic hockey rosters from recent years. They found that, on average, just 17% of those players were born in January, February or March. On Canada’s 2010 gold medal-winning team, a mere 13% adhere to the “iron law.” An early birth date may be advantageous if your goal is simply reaching the NHL. However, at “the most elite levels of play, the relative age effect reverses.” In other words, to achieve true hockey greatness, an early birthday is a disadvantage.

Steve Pinker describes Gladwell as having an Igon Value Problem. That is, he is a good story-teller who interviews experts and regurgitates anecdotes without really understanding them.

Gladwell has made millions of dollars on his books. Readers are somehow suckered into believing that he has profound insights into human behavior. He is one of the most highly paid speakers in the world. And yet his lessons are self-contradictory and contrary to common sense. The New Yorker is famous for publishing this sort of writer. Jonah Lehrer is another example.

In his defense:

I feel pretty badly for Malcolm Gladwell. Everyone from Steven Pinker to Steve Sailer criticizes his writings. He seems like a soft-spoken, genuinely kind man who is trying to encourage everyone to try their best in life, even if they don’t have the natural talent. (Not saying his detractors are saying otherwise. I understand why they do it, as the truth should matter more than good intentions.)

So I guess his books sell because people like what he has to say, whether it is right or not.

Pinker also has a new book of previous essays, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature. It includes his Why nature & nurture won’t go away where he explains how academics falsely promote the blank slate. While most liberal prefer nuture over nature, JayMan cites the evidence for genetic determinism, and denies free will. In particular, many political beliefs are highly heritable.

Update: Slate has a new article on academic redshirting:

The practice has become even more controversial in recent years over claims that some parents do it for the wrong reasons: They redshirt their kids not because their kids aren’t ready for school, but because, in the age of parenting as competitive sport, holding them out might give them an academic, social, and athletic edge over their peers. If little Delia is the star of kindergarten, they scheme, maybe she’ll ride the wave all the way to Harvard. Gaming the system this way, of course, puts other kids at a disadvantage.

I fail to see how it can be wrong to get your kid a better education. Other parents could do the same thing, if they wanted. Just because a decision is an advantage to one kid, does not mean that it is a disadvantage to others. And as the article explains, the redshirting studies indicate that it is not even an advantage:

In 2006, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California analyzed national data collected over many years from 15,000 26-year-olds. They compared what became of kids who had been redshirted to what became of kids who had been young for their class but not redshirted. They found that the redshirted kids performed worse on 10th-grade tests, were twice as likely to drop out of school, and were less likely to graduate from college; the only advantage to redshirting was that redshirted kids were marginally more likely to play varsity sports in high school. (Journalist Malcolm Gladwell made this “relative age effect” famous in his book Outliers when he pointed out that many professional hockey players were born between January and March and thus had been the oldest on their school hockey teams; however, this effect does not seem to exist for football, volleyball, and basketball or any women’s sports.)

Other research suggests that redshirted kids are less motivated and engaged than their younger peers in high school and that they are more likely to require special education services. And in a 2008 review, David Deming, an economist of education at Harvard University, and Susan Dynarski, an education and public policy expert at the University of Michigan, concluded that redshirted kids also tend to have lower IQs and earnings as adults. This latter finding is probably linked to the fact that redshirted teens are more likely to drop out of high school than non-redshirted teens. Redshirted kids tend to have lower lifetime earnings, too, because they enter the labor force a year later.

Update: Gladwell replies:

What is going on here? The kinds of people who read books in America seem to have no problem with my writing. But I am clearly a bee in the bonnet of some of the kinds of people who review books in America. I think this has to do with the way in which my books are written. I write in the genre of what might be called “intellectual adventure stories.” ...

habris should calm down. I was simply saying that all writing about social science need not be presented with the formality and precision of the academic world. There is a place for storytelling, in all of its messiness. My point was that the people who read my books appreciate this. They are perfectly aware of the strengths and weakness of the narrative form. They know what a story can and can’t do, and they understand that narratives sometimes begin in one place and end in another.

Okay, his readers like his storytelling. Just don't take him too seriously.

Suing the Boy Scouts

The newspapers report:

The publication Thursday of 20 years worth of secret records kept by the Boy Scouts of America reveal a widespread effort by the organization to cover up a scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against 1,200 scout leaders.

The records, known within the Boy Scouts itself as the “perversion files,” cover the years 1965-1985 and detail the names of the alleged perpetrators, their hometowns and other information. The files were results of the organization’s own internal investigations into sexual abuse among its leaders and include court documents, newspapers clippings in cases where charges were actually filed and other material.

Not every person whose name was contained within the thousands of pages – which the scouts officially called the “Ineligible Volunteer Files” – ever actually faced charges or was convicted. Some files only reflected concerns about someone.

Your reaction to this story is a good indicator of whether you would want Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.

The Mormons are huge promoters of the Boy Scouts. The raise money privately, use volunteers as leaders, and teach valuable lessons to the next generation. The Scouts have their own standards for who makes any acceptable youth leader, and they try to confidentially apply those standards. In some cases, this meant excluding people based on hearsay about their private lives. Romney is the Mormon and probably agrees with the overall Scout philosophy, and is not concerned with second-guess personel decisions.

The lawyers, gays, atheists, and leftist egalitarians despise the Boy Scouts and are out to destroy them. They are going to scrutinize a 40-year-old private list of names, and file lawsuits. If they form an opinion that there was a legitimate suspicion of abuse, they are going to say that the suspicions should have been reported to govt authorities. If the suspicions were of non-criminal homosexuality, then they are going to say any consideration of the info should have been illegal discrimination. Either way, they hate the idea of a private organization choosing its own leaders according to its own values.

I don't know whether Pres. Barack Obama has given an opinion about the Boy Scouts, but he bragged in the debate how he supported lawsuits about minor personnel decisions made decades in the past. See also here for how he differs from Romney.

I am afraid that the leftist Obama lawyer mentality is winning. Someday all sexual activity will be classified as legal or illegal, and anyone who is even suspected of the illegal kind will be kept on govt databases for future litigation. No one will be allowed to discriminate based on anything of the legal kind, no matter how perverted. People will be sued or sent to prison if some lawyer discovers, many years later, that they used their own judgment in making a personnel decision.

Update: Another blog adds:

For decades the Boy Scout organization made the point that permitting homosexuals to serve as group leaders would be to invite abuse.  The Scouts based their position on the well-grounded assumption that male homosexuality is essentially pedophiliac and that it would be crazy to put pedophiles in charge of boys and adolescents.  The American Left sustained a relentless culture-war against the Scouts that rested on categorizing that perfectly reasonable assumption and its argumentative consequence as a bigoted fantasy.  Now it turns out that when homosexuals did inveigle the organization, they perpetrated exactly the kinds of abuses predicted by conservative wisdom.  What is the Left’s new argument?  It is that the Scouts are wicked for concealing documentation that homosexual group leaders had preyed on their charges.  Of course these developments are in part a replay of another of the Left’s ongoing crusades – the one against the Catholic Church.  In the eyes of the Left, the Church is guilty on the one hand of condemning homosexuality and of trying to keep homosexuals out of the priesthood and on the other of covering up the outrages of priest-pedophiles.

The current CNN lead story says Boy Scouts criticized for gay ban and for "perversion files".

McQueary sues Penn State

The Penn State child sex abuse scandal is not over, and litigation will continue for years. The lawyers and officials have manipulated the evidence so that lawsuits against Penn State and Penn. taxpayers will collect many millions of dollars. Here is the latest:

(Reuters) - A key witness in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal sued Pennsylvania State University on Tuesday for more than $8 million on whistleblower, defamation and misrepresentation grounds.

Mike McQueary, a former Penn State assistant football coach, claimed in the suit filed in Center County Court that he lost his job, was misled and publicly scorned because he had told about one of the attacks.

Sandusky, a retired Penn State football defensive coordinator, was convicted in June on 45 counts of child molestation in a case that riveted national attention on child sexual abuse. Sentencing is set for October 9.

McQueary testified that he saw Sandusky raping a boy in a football locker room in 2001. He told jurors he then told head coach Joe Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley and university Vice President Gary Schultz about the incident.

The assault was never reported to police or child welfare officials. McQueary testified about it before a grand jury and Schultz and Curley were charged with perjury and failure to report suspected abuse.

McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback, was placed on administrative leave shortly after Sandusky, Curley and Schultz were charged in November 2011. He later lost his $140,000-a-year job as receivers coach.

McQueary is seeking at least $4 million in damages for alleged defamation arising from then-President Graham Spanier's public support of Schultz and Curley after the charges against them were announced.

I don't see how McQueary could be defamed. His own story is that he watched a boy being raped, and then chose (1) not to intervene to rescue the boy; (2) not to contact police; (3) not to make any effort to identify the boy afterwards; and (4) not to tell anyone the details until many years later.

There are holes in McQueary's story, and I think that he is worse than Sandusky. But just based on his own admissions, there are plenty of reasons to fire him.

Update: I previously wrote about the Sandusky case:

There was no physical evidence or timely complaints. The alleged victims told stories based on recovered memory, a dubious process with no scientific validity. The only accuser who is not suing was McQueary, and he testified in exchange for immunity for himself. So every witness against Sandusky had a very big motive to lie. None of them told a story that could be independently corroborated.

This is now slightly incorrect, as McQueary is also suing Penn State for millions of dollars. So all of the accusers are financially profiting from their recovered memory accusations.

Martins want money

I wondered below why the Trayvon Martin advocates wanted Zimmerman arrested when he had already been arrested:

“We are not asking that he be convicted; We are asking that he be arrested”

This demand is un-American because we believe that people are innocent until proven guilty, and we only punish the guilty. The Last Refuge blog argues that there is a simple monetary incentive:

Note that in section 2 of the immunity statute 776.032 a person is “immune” from criminal or CIVIL action if they are not arrested.

It is likely that Martin's family has already hired a contingency-fee lawyer to file a civil lawsuit. As I write this, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Florida) is giving a speech about how Martin was murdered and we need to have a national conversation about racial profiling. Pres. Barack Obama has also been pouring gasoline on the fire. I think that these Martin national conversations are going to backfire. When all the facts come out, it looks as if Martin will be proven to be the criminal, not Zimmerman. If so, and if the black community continues to defend Martin's behavior, then the public is apt to conclude that Martin was just the sort of kid who should have been profiled as someone you do not want in your neighborhood. In fairness, not all blacks are shouting racism. Bill Cosby says:

Cosby said calling George Zimmerman a racist doesn't solve anything.

The most common black-white crime stories involve blacks beating up whites, such as this:

Maywood, Ill. - Alton L. Hayes III, a west suburban man charged with a hate crime, told police he was so upset about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida that he beat up a white man early Tuesday. Hayes and a 15-year-old Chicago boy walked up behind the 19-year-old man victim and pinned his arms to his side, police said. Hayes, 18, then picked up a large tree branch, pointed it at the man and said, “Empty your pockets, white boy.” The two allegedly rifled through the victim’s pockets, then threw him to the ground and punched him “numerous times” in the head and back before running away, police said. Hayes and the boy are black; the victim is white. After being arrested, Hayes told police he was upset by the Trayvon Martin case and beat the man up because he was white, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said, citing court records.

And it may turn out that Martin beat up Zimmerman because Martin was a violent delinquent and Zimmerman was white/hispanic. For the weakness of the DA affidavit against Zimmerman, see PopeHat or Dershowitz. It gives the impression that the prosecutors are incompetent, corrupt, and have no case.

Update: More comments at TalkLeft on the weakness of the prosecution.

Lawyers backstab the client

AP reports:

SANFORD, Fla. -- The Trayvon Martin case took a bizarre turn Tuesday when George Zimmerman's attorneys quit, complaining that they have lost all contact with him and that he called the prosecutor and talked to a TV host after they told him not to speak to anyone.

The lawyers portrayed the former neighborhood watch captain as erratic and his mental state as shaky, and they expressed fear for his health under the pressure that has been building in the month since he shot and killed Martin, an unarmed black teenager.

Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig should be disbarred. They have violated attorney-client privilege, and abandoned a client without good cause. They misunderstand the lawyer's duty to advise the client, not give him orders. Worst of all, they have damaged their client's case by portraying him as someone who disrespects authority. The prosecutor will say that Zimmerman not only disobeyed the 911 operator, he disobeyed his own lawyers.

I am not convinced that Zimmerman did disobey the 911 operator, or that he committed a crime even if he did. I also believe in innocense until proven guilty. He is about to be charged:

According to a source familiar with Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey's plans, George Zimmerman will in fact be charged in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. According to the Washington Post, Chase will hold a press conference as early as this afternoon to announce what charges she'll bring, though since she's not empaneling a grand jury, it can't be first-degree murder, per Florida law.

The fix is in. An honest prosecutor doing a non-political investigation would take the case to the grand jury. Even the Barack Obama administration is getting into the act, and attempting to racialize the issue:

Earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder said he would take appropriate action if evidence of a civil rights crime is found to have been committed in the shooting.

The Justice Department launched an investigation of the Martin killing three weeks ago.

"I know that many of you are greatly — and rightly — concerned about the recent shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been lost to the ages," Holder told the 14th annual convention of the National Action Network, three days of discussion on race issues.

Three days of racial discussion? I still don't see any evidence that race had anything to do with the shooting or the investigation, until Obama and other race-baiters turned it into a racial issue.

Some people say that Zimmerman was the agressor based on the 911 transcript:

911 dispatcher: Are you following him? [2:24]
Zimmerman: Yeah. [2:25]
911 dispatcher: OK. We don’t need you to do that. [2:26]
Zimmerman: OK. [2:28]

However, later in the call, Zimmerman says that he is waiting at a parked car for the cops, and that he does not know where Martin is. So it appears to me that he stopped following Martin while Martin ran away. How they got into a fight has not been explained.

Stop writing about geology

The NY Times reports:

Black children are most acutely affected: The study found that 17 percent of black children - nearly 1 in 5 - received a diagnosis of asthma in 2009, up from 11.4 percent, or about 1 in 9, in 2001.

No, 17 percent is 1 in 6, not 1 in 5. I always worry about the reliability of an article like this, when it has such a glaring arithmetic mistake. Worse, I did a google search for "one in five (17 percent)" shows 100s of articles! Apparently it is a common mistake.

I guess I should be glad that they bother to report statistical evidence at all. A famous writer for the New Yorker magazine (John McPhee) says that he gets hate mail when he writes about science:

Some lawyer in Boston sent me a letter —- this man, this adult, had gone to the trouble to write in great big letters: stop writing about geology. And it’s on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston.

I thought that New Yorker readers just read for literary style, and do not care what the articles are about. The magazine did publish a physics article recently:

Deutsch believes that if a quantum computer were built it would constitute near-irrefutable evidence of what is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A number of respected thinkers in physics besides Deutsch support the Many Worlds Interpretation, though they are a minority, and primarily educated in England, where the intense interest in quantum computing has at times been termed the Oxford flu. But the infection of Deutsch’s thinking has mutated and gone pandemic. Other scientists, although generally indifferent to the truth or falsehood of Many Worlds as a description of the universe, are now working to build these dreamed-up quantum computing machines.

This should sound fishy, even if you don't know anything about the subject. Researchers are trying to do an experiment that will prove the existence of Many Worlds, and yet they are indifferent to its truth or falsehood.

How can that be? Simple. The experiments will fail, and Many Worlds is an unscientific fantasy.

No perjury conviction for Bonds

I have defended Barry Bonds, and now he has been convicted:

Home-run king Barry Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice for impeding a grand jury investigation into illegal steroid distribution, closing a sordid chapter in a scandal that ensnared some of baseball's greatest players.

The verdict Wednesday against the former San Francisco Giants star capped a nearly seven-year probe that focused on Bonds' denials under oath about knowingly using performance enhancing drugs. ...

The jury of eight women and four men, which began deliberating Friday morning, also deadlocked on three counts of perjury. ...

Jurors said they concluded that Bonds had been evasive before the grand jury, but they disagreed on whether he had lied to the panel about knowingly using steroids or human growth hormones.

So assuming we respect the jury verdict, we do not know that Bonds ever took steroids, or that he ever lied about it. All we know is that he was evasive, whatever that means, and that a 7-year multi-million prosecution failed to prove that he lied about anything.

Another report said:

The essence of the case against Bonds, the record-holder for home runs in a career (762) and in a season (73), is that he lied to a grand jury in 2003 regarding the use of anabolic steroids and the fact that he’d gotten injections from someone other than his doctors. ...

“I think it will be seen by most people as affirming that Bonds was cheating and using steroids,” former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent told Bloomberg News.

These comments are irresponsible. Some of us believe in innocence until proven guilty. A failed prosecution should be seen as innocence, not guilt. And the more time and money spent by the feds, the more Bonds should be seen as the victim of a faulty witchhunt.

I don't even see how the obstruction conviction should stand. If Bonds did not lie, and he did not interfere with the prosecution of BALCO and others, then where is the obstruction? It makes no sense to me. The feds could retry him on the perjury charges, but I think that they ought to cut their losses. They have no legitimate interest in keeping him out of the baseball hall of fame.

Update: Apparently this is the actual transcript of the testimony used to convict Bonds of obstruction:

Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't - we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want - don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.

A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that - you know, that - I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ...

The jury foreman said that this was a BS answer, and I guess it was, but I fail to see how it obstructed any justice. Bonds was explaining his relationship with Greg Anderson, and that seemed to be of interest to the district attorney. If the attorney needed additional info, then he should have specifically asked for it. Bonds has no way of knowing what the attorney needs. Anderson and the BALCO officials were convicted, and I really don't see how this answer could have hindered that prosecution.

I have been a witness when the attorney was dissatisfied with my answer for some reason. When that happens, he repeats or rephrases the question. Always. Sometimes I have missed the point of the questions. Most witnesses do. It appears to me that the attorney did a sloppy job, and Bonds is being blamed for it.

Email disclaimers

Wired magazine says that email disclaimers are meaningless:

“You have no obligation to obey the disclaimer if you decide to read a misdirected email, send it to your friends, or send it to a Wired reporter,” says Susan Lyon, a privacy and data security attorney for Perkins Coie. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

It is especially amusing to see lawyers use these silly disclaimers. It is like getting an email from a weatherman saying that a rain dance might cause a rain. It just makes me suspect that they have some misunderstandings about the law. Here is my favorite disclaimer.