Muda69

Thank you for your support. I have been considering bringing that feature back to the GID.

The Shame of the Teachers’ Unions: They’ve fought for teachers to get paid for not working, and they’ve placed children’s well-being and education low on their list of priorities. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/teachers-unions-fight-keep-kids-out-of-classrooms-limit-remote-instruction/ Spot-on commentary from Mr. Lowry. And illustrates yet again why public sector unions need to be outlawed.

A recent update on this tragedy: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2020/08/04/two-tri-west-administrators-face-failure-report-charges/5562061002/

The hits just keep on coming: https://clintoncountydailynews.com/csf-high-school-staff-member-tests-positive-for-covid-19/

The needs of the many outweigh the deaths of the few. Got it.

No, I would not.

New Palestine High School sees COVID-19 case on first day of school https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2020/08/03/new-palestine-high-school-sees-coronavirus-case-first-day-school/5575437002/

Great article. Thanks for sharing it.

It depends on the results of unbiased, peer reviewed studies on the current efficacy and safety of the vaccine. Once the studies are available to the general public I will study them and make a determination on whether or not to take the vaccine. I assume you will go through the same process?

And because it was the same deal with the swine flue vaccine that somehow now justifies it for covid-19? Btw, who here on the GID has received the swine flu vaccine?

Red Flags Soar As Big Pharma Will Be Exempt From COVID-19 Vaccine Liability Claims https://www.zerohedge.com/political/red-flags-soar-big-pharma-will-be-exempt-covid-19-vaccine-liability-claims AstraZeneca is one of the 25 pharmaceutical companies across the world, testing experimental drugs that could be used to combat the deadly virus. And, of course, if testing yields positive results, AstraZeneca could manufacture hundreds of millions of doses, with no legal recourse if side effects are seen. European officials told Reuters that product liability was a significant discussion to secure new vaccine drugs from Pfizer, Sanofi, and Johnson & Johnson. As for the US, well, when it comes to the legal framework around vaccines, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already has a law called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which provides immunity to vaccine companies if something goes wrong. With AstraZeneca, and many US big pharma companies rushing COVID-19 vaccines to market with governments granting them immunity if the vaccine has side effects, all suggest corporate elites and government regulators have very little faith in these drugs. For more color on leading vaccines in development that produce "severe" side effects, read our latest piece titled "Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine Induced Adverse Reactions In "More Than Half" Of Trial Participants." Maybe these rushed vaccines are more for optics, get consumers back into airplanes, hotels, resorts, and malls. The major red flag is how governments are allowing big pharma to rush experimental vaccines, with no legal recourse if something goes terribly wrong. So I guess if covid-10 doesn't kill us all the vaccine will.

The Germans are getting restless: https://justthenews.com/world/europe/thousands-turn-out-anti-lockdown-protest-germany

https://deadspin.com/ncaa-robs-predominantly-black-football-basketball-pla-1844583183 Pay them.

And you don't know the first rule about internet forum debate. The first one to play the Hitler Card loses. No exceptions. Besides, can you please tell me where Mr. Trump has initiated a program to mass exterminate Muslims and Hispanics?

https://apnews.com/757359e85c4d9f555469848b21df3ab4 Doesn't really mean anything until more Millenials than Boomer actually vote. And then us Gen Xers will be left in the dust.

AOC Calls Statue of Priest Who Ministered to Leper Colony an Example of ‘White Supremacist Culture’ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aoc-calls-statue-of-priest-who-ministered-to-leper-colony-an-example-of-white-supremacist-culture/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first “It’s not Queen Lili’uokalani…the only Queen Regnant of Hawaii, who is immortalized and whose story is told. It is Father Damien,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a Facebook story in which she lamented the absence of statues of female figures in the Capitol. “This is what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks like!” In addition to Father Damien, the Capitol houses a statue of King Kamehameha I, who united the Hawaiian islands under one kingdom by 1810. While still a princess, Lili’uokalani visited Father Damien at the colony to present him with honors from the Hawaiian royal government. In 2009, then-governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle proclaimed October 11 Saint Damien Day. “In Hawai‘i, Damien remains a spiritual hero and an icon of love, compassion, courage, humility and humanitarian service,” Lingle said at the time. The U.S. has seen a series of attempts to remove statues considered offensive following the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed during his arrest by Minneapolis police officers. These statues have included Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee, while other statues that have been vandalized include likenesses of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, and in one case, Frederick Douglass.

In Michigan, the Wrong Way To Govern During a Pandemic https://reason.com/2020/08/01/in-michigan-the-wrong-way-to-govern-during-a-pandemic/

I am not a Democrat. I haven't voted for a uni-party candidate in over three decades, and probably never will again. That said, I also don't believe Mr. Trump is a good president, nor he is qualified to be POTUS for another term. No, they possibly mean Mr. Trump would support an effort to delay the 2020 presidential election until, in his words, " people can properly, securely, and safely vote". Would you support such an effort, swordfish? Do you believe that currently people cannot properly, securely, and safely vote? And if the election would miraculously somehow be delayed who would then make the call that the people can now "properly, securely, and safely" vote? I bet Mr. Trump believes that decision resides in the executive branch of the federal government..............

The Sad Cult of Esoteric Trumpism https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-sad-cult-of-esoteric-trumpism/

No, Trump Can't Delay the Election https://reason.com/2020/07/30/no-trump-cant-delay-the-election/ Both sentences of the president's tweet are inaccurate, but let's take the second part first, since that's the bit that threatens to blow a gigantic hole in 230-plus years of American democratic tradition. Election dates are set by the U.S. Constitution, by Congress, and by the states—the president has literally no authority over it. When it comes to picking the president, there's actually no constitutional requirement for a popular election at all. What the constitution does say is that Congress gets to pick the date by which the states must choose their presidential electors—that is, the 538 members of the electoral college. Under current law, that date is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. How the states pick those electors is up to each state legislature to decide. "While every state currently chooses its electors through popular election—where votes cast for presidential candidates are counted as votes for the electors pledged to those candidates—a state legislature could decide to select electors itself if it determined elections were infeasible," the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a March report about elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Indeed, it was common for legislatures to select electors without popular elections until the mid-1800s." The CRS reports that some state constitutions allow governors to postpone elections for emergencies, but there is no provision in the U.S. Constitution allowing federal officials to change the date unless Congress changes the law or a constitutional amendment is passed. But that's never happened during wars, pandemics, or other national emergencies—there is no reason to think it should happen this year. In fact, some Republicans in Congress are already rejecting the idea. Just for fun, here's what would happen if enough states—presumably red states—were to cancel or postpone the election, and therefore no candidate won an outright majority in the electoral college, according to that same CRS report. In that case, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives at the start of its next term: January 6, 2021. But the current House term expires on January 3. If, hypothetically, all elections were canceled or postponed and there was no new Congress to meet on January 6, the CRS report says, that doesn't change the fact that the incumbent president's term ends at noon on January 20th. "There are no provisions of law permitting a President to stay in office after this date, even in the event of a national emergency, short of the ratification of a new constitutional amendment," according to the CRS. In that absolute worst-case scenario, the presidential order of succession would come into play. There would be no elected vice president, so Mike Pence is out of the running. If there was a functioning House of Representatives, the new Speaker of the House would become president. If that person could not serve, the president pro tempore of the Senate—currently Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), though that could change before January—would become the nation's chief executive. The bottom line: Trump can't cancel or postpone the election, and even if the election doesn't take place for some reason, he can't legally remain in office. What about the other part of Trump's Thursday morning bombshell tweet? For starters, he suggests that there is some difference between mail-in voting and absentee voting when they are actually the same thing. Some states require that you provide an excuse when you ask for an absentee ballot, but most have now switched to no-excuse absentee balloting—otherwise known generally as "mail-in voting"—in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, the process for voting is the same: you get a ballot, you fill it out, and you mail it back. There are also a handful of states that have switched to conducting elections entirely by mail, and none of them have seen increases in voter fraud—something that is incredibly rare no matter how elections are conducted. Regardless of what you call it or how many people participate, there's little indication that voting by mail is some sort of scheme to defraud Republicans. Colorado is one of the states that recently switched to all-mail balloting, and the system was set up by a then-Secretary of State Wayne Williams—a Republican. An analysis of voting patterns conducted by the Brennan Center, a legal nonprofit housed at New York University's law school, found that that the people most likely to vote by mail in 2016 were white voters over the age of 65—a key Trump demographic. It's true that some states are likely to be overwhelmed by the number of absentee ballots cast this year—a month after its primary election, New York is still counting votes cast by mail—but Trump's attempt to delegitimize mail-in voting is likely only hurting him and his party. Indeed, in June, Politico reported that registered Democrats in Florida had requested roughly 300,000 more absentee ballots than registered Republicans—a gap that the state's Democratic Party chairman attributed to Trump's success at tamping down Republican enthusiasm for voting by mail. The simplest explanation for Trump's bizarre tweet on Thursday morning is that he's a deeply unpopular incumbent—as even he has recently admitted—who trails in the polls and doesn't see an easy way to turn things around. Calling to delay the election, even as he is also insisting that it is safe for schools to open, comes off as hypocritical, weak, and politically self-defeating. It's always been obvious that Trump didn't care to learn about the actual limits or powers of the office he holds. If he had, he would already know how ridiculous this all sounds. He's making excuses for losing before the game is even over. It's not dictatorial. It's just kind of pathetic. Yep. Pathetic it is.

But isn't a "structured apprenticeship" basically those 100+ hour work weeks that new lawyers have to put in, like your read about in John Grisham novels?

https://reason.com/2020/07/29/the-case-for-replacing-the-bar-exam-with-diploma-privilege/ Defenders of bar exams argue that consumers would otherwise have little or no way to tell whether a given lawyer is competent or not. But, in reality, there are many other signals to determine that. Often, clients hire not a specific lawyer, but a firm. In that event, the firm's reputation is a signal of quality, and firms have an incentive to protect that reputation by avoiding the hiring of incompetents. Even with solo practitioners, quality can be discerned by consulting past clients, and a variety of other mechanisms. Legal scholar Gillian Hadfield has an excellent article making the case that barriers to information can be further reduced by eliminating prohibitions on the corporate practice of law. If corporations were allowed to provide basic legal services—as they currently do with many other professional services, such as accounting—that would reduce cost and also make it easier to signal quality. When you hire H&R Block to do your taxes, you are relying on the overall reputation of the firm, not on that of the specific person who handles your case. Legal services can work similarly. These methods are not perfect. But they are likely to be far better than relying on bar exam passage as a signal of quality, since the latter is really just a test of memorization. One possible alternative to "diploma privilege" is simply postponing bar exams, as some states have done. But that prevents thousands of recent law graduates from earning an income in the meantime—and blocks clients from using their services. If states are unwilling to forego the bar exam entirely, they should at least provide temporary diploma privilege for a period of, say, three years, by which time the pandemic is likely to be over, and bar exams can be safely administered. Online bar exams are another possible solution. The obvious objection to them is that it is extremely difficult to prevent cheating on an online "closed book" exam. It may well be impossible to ensure that a test-taker doesn't have study guides or reference books with her as she takes the exam. That doesn't bother me too much, because I believe bar exams are a sham credential in any case. But even I recognize there is some unfairness in a format that rewards those most willing to cheat. In addition, not everyone has access to software and internet connections that are likely to be reliable through many hours of exam taking. On balance, online exams seem preferable to in-person ones, or to keeping law school graduates in limbo until in-person exams become safer. But diploma privilege is a better approach than either. For those states that stubbornly insist on holding in-person exams during a pandemic, I am tempted to revive my "modest proposal" for bar exam reform (first developed many years ago😞 If the knowledge tested on bar exams is so important that we must ensure all practicing lawyers know it—even at the risk of exacerbating a deadly pandemic—then surely that principle applies with extra force to prominent leaders of the legal profession, particularly those responsible for setting professional standards for others. By this reasoning, they should have to take the exam on the same terms as they impose on new bar applicants. If that means taking an in-person exam during a pandemic, then so be it! On balance, however, I will not insist on this idea, so long as the pandemic continues. I recognize that many bar association leaders are likely to be at special risk, due to age and health conditions. The "modest proposal" might be a useful reform under normal conditions. But it would be wrong to impose it now. We should not require bar leaders to risk their lives and health for no good reason. But they, in turn, should not impose such risks on others. Finally, critics may argue that, as a law professor, I have a self-interest in promoting "diploma privilege." My brief response is that I have also long advocated abolishing or at least reducing the requirement that all lawyers attend ABA-accredited law schools, as well. I have also long advocated a variety of other reforms that would have the effect of reducing the demand for law school education and legal services generally—most notably reducing the number and complexity of laws. I don't claim diploma privilege is the optimal regulatory regime, merely that it's superior to system under which lawyers are required to both have a diploma and pass a worthless bar exam. An interesting proposal. I would like to hear the opinions on this from our resident GID legal professionals.

I don't understand why that is so hard to believe. https://www.oratoryprepomega.org/2017/03/07/conspiracy-lizard-people-rule-the-world/ Now I don't believe the theory that the moon is hollow, but there probably is a secret Nazi moon base still there.