18 Sunday Jun 2017
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Happy Father’s Day 2017
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Take a moment today to remember dear old Dad. He is, was, will be, kind of important.
Do not pray for easy lives.
Pray to be stronger men.
-John F. Kennedy
A salute to all the good father’s out there.
Baby Blues, Kirkman & Scott, 6/18/17.
17 Saturday Jun 2017
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on ISIS in Israel
Some have speculated as to why ISIS never seems to target Israel despite the Jewish State being right there in the middle of the Middle East. Let’s now put that speculation to rest. ISIS claimed responsibility for the murder of a policewoman Friday night in Jerusalem. The only people doubting the claim are Israeli officials (to their credit, they do have more than one terror group to worry about).
The Islamic State on Friday night claimed responsibility for a coordinated shooting and stabbing terror attack in Jerusalem that killed an Israeli police officer, Hadas Malka, 23, in what the jihadist group vowed would be the first of many attacks.
The jihadist group in an online statement said three IS fighters had targeted “a gathering of Jews” in an operation Friday, and warned that “this attack will not be the last.”
“With God’s help, we succeeded in carrying out an attack in the heart of Jerusalem,” the group said.
This was the first time that the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for an attack in Israel, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist organizations.
By my reckoning this is not the first ISIS sponsored attack there though I will defer to The Times story and SITE. The attack came in the middle of Ramadan, when the Israelis kindly (foolishly) gave permission for Palestinians to enter Jerusalem to visit relatives. The permission is now revoked.
They use ceramic knives, here and in London, etc., because they are super sharp. These animals mean business. The Times / Israeli Police.
As ALWAYS, the attackers were previously known to the police:
The attackers were from Deir Abu-Mashal, a village near Ramallah, and had previously been arrested for or involved in “terrorist activity,” a Shin Bet statement said. Security forces late Friday night surrounded Deir Abu-Mash’al, and were preparing to raid the assailants’ homes to question their family members regarding the attack.
Known after being arrested for prior “terrorist activity.” ALWAYS.
Not that you’ll read much (if any) of this in the worthless American press, but it will be interesting to see the Israeli response. They’re known to be a little intolerant when it comes to terrorism.
One wonders if or when they will host a candlelight vigil to express solidarity with the people trying to kill them. Is Ariana available?
16 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Death Panel: The Spectacle of Obama-TrumpCare Continues to Disappoint – Everyone and in the Most Ridiculous Ways
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Congress, Donald Trump, GOP, law, ObamaCare, Republicans, TrumpCare
I suppose “fund it so we can kill it” ranks up there with “pass it so we can find out what’s in it.” It’s no cause to hunt them down on the diamond, but the current GOP crop has to be the most ridiculous bunch of idiot losers in legislative history. Has anyone any idea where the ObamaCare repeal/replace/repeal and replace/amend/screw up is possibly going? It seems the GOP doesn’t:
Top congressional Republicans have delivered a surprising plea to the Trump administration: Don’t sabotage the Affordable Care Act while we try to repeal it.
Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander on Thursday became the second GOP committee chairmen in as many weeks to urge the administration to continue payments of subsidies to insurance companies that are considered crucial to stabilizing the individual market and preventing sharp premium increases.
Under President Trump’s direction, the administration has refused to guarantee that it will pay the subsidies, which are known as “cost-sharing reduction payments” and help insurers keep down deductibles for low-income customers while still making a profit. The decision has infuriated Democrats and insurers alike, and several companies have cited the uncertainty caused by the administration as the reason for exiting Obamacare exchanges in certain states and counties.
In an unusual alliance, Republicans in Congress are now joining the effort to pressure Trump to make the payments even after they sued the Obama administration over their legality three years ago. “These payments will help to avoid the real possibility that millions of Americans will literally have zero options for insurance in the individual market in 2018,” Alexander told Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, at a hearing on Thursday. “We have a collapsing individual market as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and as part of a transition from a collapsing market to a stable market in which Americans have more choices of insurance at a lower-cost, I believe Republicans will need to temporarily support some things we don’t want to do in the long term, and I would hope Democrats would do that as well.”
You, our man, do what we sued the other guy to stop a few years ago. In the meanwhile, we’ll busy ourselves doing nothing.
These fools could have: 1) fixed the current system; 2) replaced it with … anything, or; 3) just plain repealed it. They could have done this already. The same crowd rammed a full and complete repeal through Congress a few years back when Obama was in the White House. Naturally, he vetoed the Bill. They could do the exact same thing now, with Trump ithcing to sign off on it. A Bill to do that is ready right now and has been in the House hopper since January. Instead they dally and posture in the most pitiful manner possible.
And people vote for this?! Some pay money to support this?
Obama and Co. gave America a failed policy from the start. Just about everyone with an IQ north of room temperature knew that. They still know it. The Democrats, the media, and the medical/insurance scam industry are already starting to shift the blame for the systemic failures of the doomed-from-the-start law to the GOP and even Trump. Congressional Republicans are moving Heaven and Earth to help justify the shift.
Again, the healthcare options are, in order of best to worst:
It’s amazing, given the comparison, that numbers 3 and 6 actually seem somewhat attractive.
The Daily Hatch.
Please, please remember this come November of 2018 and 2020.
16 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Other Columns
And anymore, it’s an experience more than an education. I suppose the following does not apply to STEMs (maybe and for now), many professional tracks, and broad-spectrum education sought out by those with both the aptitude and the existing financial abilities. This is for the other 90% of students and potential applicants. It is time to think long and hard about paying (financing) a fortune for four, five, or ten years of increasingly useless drivel.
From Jonathan Newman at Mises:
Students are running out of reasons to pursue higher education. Here are four trends documented in recent articles:
[1] Graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills
The Wall Street Journal reported on the troubling results of the College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+), administered in over 200 colleges across the US.
According to the WSJ, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table”. The outcomes were the worst in large, flagship schools: “At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.”
There is extensive literature on two mechanisms by which college graduates earn higher wages: actually learning new skills or by merely holding a degree for the world to see (signaling). The CLA+ results indicate that many students aren’t really learning valuable skills in college.
As these graduates enter the workforce and reveal that they do not have the required skills to excel in their jobs, employers are beginning to discount the degree signal as well. Google, for example, doesn’t care if potential hires have a college degree. They look past academic credentials for other characteristics that better predict job performance.
[2] Shouting matches have invaded campuses across the country [SJW mayhem]
It seems that developing critical thinking skills has taken a backseat to shouting matches in many US colleges. At Evergreen State College in Washington, student protests have hijacked classrooms and administration. Protesters took over the administration offices last month, and have disrupted classes as well. It has come to the point where enrollment has fallen so dramatically that government funding is now on the line.
The chaos at Evergreen resulted in “anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the campus being closed for three days.” One wonders if some of these students are just trying to get out of class work and studying by staging a campus takeover in the name of identity politics and thinly-veiled racism.
The shouting match epidemic hit Auburn University last semester when certain alt-right and Antifa groups (who are more similar than either side would admit) came from out of town to stir up trouble. Neither outside group offered anything of substance for discourse, just empty platitudes and shouting. I was happy to see that the general response from Auburn students was to mock both sides or to ignore the event altogether. Perhaps the Auburn Young Americans for Liberty group chose the best course of action: hosting a concert elsewhere on campus to pull attention and attendance away from both groups of loud but empty-headed out-of-towners. Of the students who chose not to ignore the event, my favorite Auburn student response was a guy dressed as a carrot holding a sign that read, “I Don’t CARROT ALL About Your Outrage.”
The other two reasons are:
[3] More efficient alternatives;
[4] Tuitions are Up; Incomes are Down.
All of these are telling and alarming. Any one by itself would be worrisome. For me, perhaps the worst is the lack of learning – especially considering the ridiculous costs imposed.
Moon Prep.
What is the point of spending the better part of a decade (I think I was the last four-year degree man to actually finish in four years) at school, when there are no measurable increases in knowledge or critical thinking? To go through this, mortgaging ten to thirty years of one’s life in debt without the prospect of decent employment is ludicrous.
These are but four reasons. Look around and I’ll bet you can come up with another four – or forty. Google: “James Altucher college” for some extreme insight into better options.
If you’re in college or thinking about it, or if you know someone who is: seriously consider the many and increasing downsides. One can watch football and drink beer for a lot less and without the increased stress.
15 Thursday Jun 2017
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on That Esspecially Special Unique Specialness
Wanted murderer and fugitive, Ricky Dubose, is much more special than wanted murderer and fugitive, Donnie Rowe. Just look at his special, unique, meaningful tattoos:
Ricky on the bottom (perhaps as it was in their cell…). WSB, Atlanta.
Fink sinks the ink.
The two … cellmates are on the run after killing two Georgia prison guards.
Is it that only murderous, low-life, escaped, prison thugs have neck and face tattoos or, could it be that the neck and face tattoos make one a murderous, low-life, prison thug?
I’m sure there’s a deep and spiritual meaning and purpose behind the tats. Isn’t there always?
By the way, if you see these two and have a gun handy, the FBI is offering $130K (dead or alive). Just saying.
15 Thursday Jun 2017
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Deep Thoughts on Imperial Decline
Charles Hugh Smith examines the decay of post-America, partly through the lens of the late Roman Empire.
To these lists I would add a few more that are especially visible in the current Global Empire of Debt that encircles the globe and encompasses nations of all sizes and political/cultural persuasions:
1. An absurdly heightened sense of refinement as the wealth of the top 5% has risen so mightily as a direct result of financialization and globalization that the top .1% has been forced to seek ever more extreme refinements to differentiate the Elite class (financial-political royalty) from financial nobility (top .5% or so), the technocrat class (top 5%), the aspirant class (next 15%) and everyone below (the bottom 80%).
Now that just about any technocrat/ member of the lower reaches of the financial nobility can afford a low-interest loan on a luxury auto, wealthy aspirants must own super-cars costing $250,000 and up.
A mere yacht no longer differentiates financial royalty from lower-caste financial Nobles, so super-yachts are de riguer, along with extremes such as private islands, private jets in the $80 million-each range, and so on.
Even mere technocrat aspirants routinely spend $150 per plate for refined dining out and take extreme vacations to ever more remote locales to advance their social status.
Examples abound of this hyper-inflation of refinement as the wealth of the top 5% has skyrocketed.
2. The belief in the permanence of the status quo has reached quasi-religious levels of faith. The possibility that the entire financialized, politicized circus of extremes might actually be nothing more than a sand castle that’s dissolving in the rising tides of history is not just heresy–it doesn’t enter the minds of those reveling in refinement or those demanding more Bread and Circuses (Universal Basic Income, etc.)
3. Luxury, not service, defines the financial-political Elites. As Turchin pointed out in his book on the decline of empires, in the expansionist, integrative eras of empires, Elites based their status on service to the Common Good and the defense (or expansion) of the Empire.
While there are still a few shreds of noblesse oblige in the tattered banners of the financial elites, the vast majority of the Elites classes are focused on scooping up as much wealth and power as they can in the shortest possible time, with the goal being not to serve society or the Common Good but to enter the status competition game with enough wealth to afford the refined dining, luxury travel to remote locales, second and third homes in exotic but safe hideaways, and so on.
4. An unquestioned faith in the unlimited power of the state and central bank.The idea that the mightiest governments and central banks might not be able to print their way of our harm’s way, that is, create as much money and credit as is needed to paper over any spot of bother, is unthinkable for the vast majority of the populace, Elites and debt-serfs alike.
That all this newly issued currency and credit is nothing but claims on future production of goods and services and rising productivity never enters the minds of the believers in unlimited state/bank powers. We have been inculcated with the financial equivalent of the Divine Powers of the Emperor: the government and central bank possess essentially divine powers to overcome any problem, any crisis and any conflict simply by creating more money, in whatever quantities are deemed necessary.
If $1 trillion in fresh currency will do the trick–no problem! $10 trillion? No problem! $100 trillion? No problem! there is no upper limit on how much new currency/credit the government and central bank can create.
I love comparing Empire to Empire though I don’t relish the implications. Declining morals, debased money, unending wars, foreign invasions, rank corruption, mass disparities between classes – all have been seen before. Gibbon’s work comes to mind. Luckily, we know America is the indispensable nation, completely immune to reality.
14 Wednesday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
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Congress, crazy, crime, firearms, GOP, gun control, leftists, Republicans, society, War, Washington
Shots fired first thing in the morning. The news rehashed all day long. If you just emerged from under a rock, in a cave, on a desert island – go back! But first know what everyone else does: James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Illinois, opened fire with a rifle this morning at a baseball field just outside D.C. His targets were Congressional Republicans practicing for the annual GOP/DNC charity game.
Five people were wounded, including LA Congressman Steve Scalise. All are expected to recover. Fortunately, only the lunatic shooter was killed, dropped by Capitol Police at the scene.
James T. Hodgkinson, crazy man (deceased).
James Hodgkinson was a deranged leftist, Bernie Sanders fanboy, and homicidal sociopath. Even CNN is covering that angle which means it must be universally understood and accepted. Enough with it.
Several things:
I have no use whatever for Republicans and Democrats. I’m glad they’ve found solidarity today. Great. “An attack on one of us … blah, blah, blah.” In truth they almost always have solidarity in their quest to wreck the country.
The baseball game is a perfect metaphor. On the ball field, Team GOP squares off against Team DNC. They oppose each other in play on the field but the overall goal is shared: raise money for charity. If that were their entire purpose I would applaud wholeheartedly. It isn’t.
In Congress, Team GOP squares off against Team DNC. They oppose each other with idiotic grandstanding and faux ideologies but the goal is shared: raise power for their Big Club masters. More power and money for them, less of everything for you.
I’m not saying take a rifle and shoot them. I am not saying that.
The whole lot of them aren’t worth a bullet, let alone the 50 fired off this morning.
But they have, with much and great assistance, utterly wrecked and destroyed the country I grew up in. Maybe “utterly” isn’t the right word just yet. Parts linger here and there. But darned near everything is fractured, including the people.
Hodgkinson is a picture perfect example of that fracture. And there are many more where he came from. People on the left really, really hate Donald Trump, GOPers, God, and you. They make plays about assassinating Trump. They hold up a mockery of his bloody severed head. They punch people talking to journalists. They hit people with bike locks. Some, more than just one nut from Illinois, are willing to murder.
The right-wing can boast some similar ideologues, but this post isn’t about them. This is about the leftoids, the communists, the blue-hair, shrieking loonies who hate the above mentioned personas. They hate a lot of people and a lot of things. And I’m writing about the “normal” ones. Their ultra-violent criminal allies in the ghettos and their pets of the Jihad are bad enough. But the home team regulars may be the worst of all.
Yes, they are full of hate. However, lately and quietly they have seemingly gotten over one object of hate – guns. Early this morning, before the facts were clear, I think I only heard the once ubiquitous calls for gun control from two sources, two fringe sources at that. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, other Democrats, CNN, and the media have been strangely quiet about the whole “a gun did this” thing. It’s almost like they’re over it. And they might be.
Truthfully, most lefties never favored full gun control. Sure, they wanted to take your guns and mine. But they always had ways of carving out exceptions for themselves, their friends, and their security guards. Funny.
I started reading maybe back in December about the rise in liberal gun ownership. Just this time last year the same people were beating the same old, worn drum of disarmament. Remember Kersh Kuntzman almost exactly a year ago – he of the frightening AR-15 experience? My but things seem to have changed.
A year ago they were against guns. By December they had started buying them. At rallies and riots, here and there, this spring, they started toting them – in poor and uncomfortable form. Today they started using them – again, rather poorly. (Open baseball field? Clear day? AK at close range? Five wounded? Come on…). Tomorrow, however, cometh the next natural progressive step: shooting well. That’s coming about and up to speed pretty fast.
I’ve already heard some idiots making fun of the libs for being: soft, wimps, queers, etc. “They probably use little pink rifles.” Funny but more delusional than accurate.
These people are violence personified. They are the heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pot, and all the other brutal leftist dictators of the 20th Century. Then, they collectively racked up a death toll of about 250 Million. That’s anything but soft or wimpy. “Dangerous” is more like it.
They may have taken a short break while they tried to take down the Second Amendment. And by “they,” I mean the ordinary liberals; their leaders never put down the sword (or the bombs). When the assault on the 2A failed and failed pretty miserably I guess they decided to get back to their more traditional ways.
This morning they stormed back in style. More of this is coming and not just against Congress.
So, what should we, the remnants of the Old America do? I’d suggest preparing for battle. One survivor of this morning’s attack credited a police officer with saving lives. As usual in these matters, things took a turn for the better as soon as a good guy with a gun showed up and started shooting back.
If the officer(s) hadn’t been there, this could have turned into a multiple homicide bloodbath. That’s the commonality with political assassination attempts, violent crimes, and terror strikes – they all rely on unarmed, soft targets.
It’s time we ended that part of the equation. Why wait for an officer who might not be there? Arm yourselves. Train yourselves. Carry everywhere. Shoot back. And win. Winning will be kind of important…
While this could have really been a stand-alone event, the insular work of a single nut case, something not likely to be repeated, it could also be something more and something much worse. Remember all the fracturing after a century of descent. The shots fired first thing this morning could well be the first shots of a new civil war.
14 Wednesday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Paul Craig Roberts on the Russia Fantasy, the Politicians, the Media, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the Utter Failure of American Leadership
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Roberts never disappoints. Today he masterfully interweaves the various, total failures of post-American society into a narrative even the denizens of the Cave might be able to follow.
There is no sign that American leadership in any area is actually capable of thought. Consider Wall Street and corporate leadership. To boost share prices Wall Street forced all corporations to desert their home country and move the production of goods and services sold to Americans offshore to where labor and regulatory costs were lower. The lower costs raised profits and share prices. Wall Street threatened resistant corporations with takeovers of the companies if they refused to move abroad in order to increase their profits.
Neither Wall Street nor corporate boards and CEOs were smart enough to understand that moving jobs offshore also moved US consumer incomes and purchasing power offshore. In other words, the financial and business leadership were too stupid to comprehend that without the incomes from high value-added, high productivity US jobs, the American consumer would not have the discretionary income to continue in his role as the economy’s driver.
The Federal Reserve caught on to Wall Street’s mistake. To rectify the mistake, the Fed expanded credit, allowing a buildup in consumer debt to keep the economy going on credit purchases. However, once consumer debt is high relative to income, the ability to buy more stuff departs. In other words, credit expansion is not a permanent fix for the lack of consumer income growth.
A country whose financial and business leadership is too stupid to understand that a population increasingly employed in part-time minimum wage jobs is not a big spending population is a country whose leadership has failed.
It is strictly impossible to boost profits by offshoring jobs without also offshoring US consumer incomes. Therefore, the profits from offshoring are temporary. Once enough jobs have been moved offshore that aggregate demand is stymied, the domestic market stagnates and then declines.
As I have demonstrated so many times for so many years, as has John Williams (shadowstats.com), the jobs reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics are nonsense. The jobs in the alleged recovery from June 2009 are largely low-income domestic service jobs and the product of the theoretical birth/death model. The alleged recovery from the 2007-08 financial crisis is the first recovery in history in which the labor force participation rate declined. Labor force participation rates decline when the economy offers scant job opportunities, not when employment opportunities are rising.
What we know about US jobs is that the jobs are increasingly part-time minimum wage jobs. According to a presstitute news report that might or might not be true, there are only 12 counties in the entirety of the United States in which a person can rent a one-bedroom home on a minimum wage income.
Roberts knows, I know, you know, that these idiots will never learn from their overwhelming mistakes. They have completely abandoned reality, you and yours with it. The answer to any of it, from the fools, is always more of the same.
Must we all have a Charlton Heston moment? Is That Baloney.
One wonders how long this charade will go on. The experts seem to think, at a maximum, another 16 to 23 years. Let’s call it 20, with an inside safety margin of 15: you have 15 years left to prepare for something not seen since 476 AD.
You should probably get to work on that today.
13 Tuesday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Europe Faces the Choice of Either Halting the Invasion or Losing Their Cultures, Civilizations, and Freedoms
It’s win or lose.
Right now, the losers have it, at least in France. The French decided to forego the pro-French candidate and are even now beginning to reap their rewards. Macron is making the post-Charlie Hebdo temporary emergency police powers permanent.
Emmanuel Macron very quickly made it official: He will introduce a bill which will transform extraordinary state of emergency powers into regular police practice.
According to Le Monde, which saw a leaked copy of the bill: “…almost all the measures of the state of emergency will be found in common law.”
What this means is that the post-Charlie Hebdo war hysteria has not only never stopped, but will have become the new, permanent normal: Anyone can be arrested, searched and detained with just a simple accusation. Judges simply need to be “informed”; police have carte blanche.
So…when can I start referring to France as an “authoritarian state” without getting edited?
Diversity is our strength. It is also a permanent police state. Freedoms lost and the enemy still among them. Nice.
A better, more realistic, and far prettier politician, Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, is screaming for a halt to the invasion. At least a temporary halt.
The mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, has asked the Italian government to temporarily halt immigration to the city.
In a letter reportedly sent to Paola Basilone, the prefect of Rome, Raggi (pictured) called for a “moratorium” on new arrivals and said: “I find it impossible, as well as risky, to think up further accommodation structures.”
The mayor, a member of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement political party, explained she was making the request because of the “strong migratory presence” in Rome and “the continued influx of foreign citizens”.
It’s not clear how long the temporary ban, reported by thelocal.it, would last.
According to the most recent figures published in Italy on January 1, 2016, there were 364,632 foreign-born people registered as living in Rome, which has a metropolitan population of about 4.35 million. Foreigners represent about eight per cent of its population.
According to the 2016 census, Italy has a population of about 60.5 million. However, it has experienced a steady flow of African and Middle Eastern migration from Libya in recent years, almost certainly blurring the true picture of how many people live in the country.
Figures released by the National Institute for Statistics in Italy (Istat) today state that more than five million people living in the country are foreign-born – equivalent to about 8.3 percent of the national population.
A temporary ban would be a good temporary start until a permanent ban and deportations can be arranged.
Yes, Virginia, there is a problem. And unless your government and others on the Continent halt it, it is going to overwhelm and destroy Christendom. And soon. The migration is just getting started.
The migrants pouring into Europe have changed routes: the crossing between Turkey and Greece is practically closed, but ever greater numbers are risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy.
A criminal industry has flourished, while the European Union has beefed up its border agency Frontex to try to check the mass migration.
Frontex is at once both good cop and bad cop, rescuing migrants from sinking boats but also dropping them off at welcome centres where they risk being sent back home.
Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri summed up the situation in an interview with AFP.
– Who are the migrants? –
On the shores of Greece there are now “80 or 100 people who arrive every day, whereas we had 2,500 a day” before the agreement with Turkey, said Leggeri.
Among those who arrive from Africa via the central Mediterranean and Libya, whose number is up by more than 40 percent, most come from west Africa. They are Senegalese, Guineans, Nigerians. In 2016 they totalled 180,000.
They are mainly economic migrants and include many young men but also families and young women. Nigerian women are often exploited as prostitutes in Europe.
Young men of fighting age, a few prostitutes, and more than a few Jihadists. A lovely, police state-inducing additive. There’s a supply of about 700 MILLION! who would happily invade Europe tomorrow, free transportation allowed. It must stop. The invasion must cease and the existing intruders must be sent home.
AFP/Michel Viatteau.
…may be as simple as a law and a sign reading, “No Invaders Allowed.” If that fails…
Bushmaster / Alliant.
Sink the boats or sink the Continent.
And, now, for a closer look at Rome’s leading lady…
Mayor Virginia Raggi. Now that’s a politician I could support. Getty.
13 Tuesday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
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I just read that retired Federal Judge Marvin Shoob died. He was 94. And he was, in my opinion, a thoroughly decent jurist and a gentleman.
Marvin Shoob, the embodiment of an independent federal judiciary and a jurist who consistently protected the powerless and disadvantaged, died Monday at his home in Atlanta. He was 94.
Shoob retired in February 2016 as a senior U.S. District Court judge after 36 years on the bench.
“It has been an honor and privilege to serve as a United States district judge,” Shoob wrote in a letter, announcing his retirement. “For this opportunity, I am most grateful.”
The AJC recounted some of his more famous decisions, decisions that don’t all necessarily square with my legal outlook:
Among his most noteworthy decisions, Shoob ruled licensed firearms owners could not carry guns into parts of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport; Fulton County had to improve conditions at his overcrowded, dangerous jail; Cobb County had to remove its Ten Commandments display at its courthouse; and Georgia had to place residents with development disabilities into community settings, not making them institutionalized — a ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999.
I disagre(ed) with all of these except for the jailhouse case. That’s okay, as minds can differ, and do. However, it is not the disagreements I remember, but my single case before Judge Shoob, my only case ever in the Northern District.
My guy was sued in the N. Dist. over a copyright issue. Due to his misplaced reliance on the lies of a certain unnamed mega-transnational insurance company, he found himself with a default judgment. He also found himself in a court far from home and far from where the alleged transgression supposedly happened.
Judge Shoob did three things for us: First, he “opened default” as a matter of fairness; he believed the maxim that “justice abhors a default”. It was the decent and legal thing to do. Second, he transferred the case, at our request, to the Southern District – where it really belonged. Home field advantage is real and never hurts. Third, he put a verbal whipping on the opposing counsel, who had been until that point … haughty to say the least.
Once back home, we wrapped the case (a really ridiculous but eye-opening matter) up with a neat little settlement. That was … seven, eight? years ago??? Without Judge Shoob’s interventions, the case might still be in court.
Come to think of it, he’s the same federal judge that slapped down Georgia’s illegal “implied consent” law, not too long ago, as a violation of Due Process. Another sound decision for freedom.
Rich Addicks/AJC.
God’s speed, Marvin Shoob.
PERRIN LOVETT 
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