It's those wacky folks at homeland security again: freezing the assets of a puppeteering club (they dared to change bank branches! the temerity!).
But that's really OK, because there are not going to be so many children flying around to see puppets — you see, there are babies on the no-fly list.
One of the self-imposed duties that comes with the job is attending the dinner we give to welcome first-year students. If that sentence sounds as if the dinner isn’t something I look forward to, well consider these facts:
This year was no exception as to points 1-4, but very different on point 5: a surprising number of incoming students had found this blog, so they seemed happy to put a face to the rants.
And I happened to sit with some extraordinary students at dinner.
And these were not our international LL.M. students, who are always wonderfully experienced and diverse. These are a random sample of our J.D. students.
One could have quite a bit of fun teaching in a place full of students like that…
This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow explains how to reason properly about torture.
One of my favorite UM staff people has a new blog, and she offers a hot stock tip:
pssst…hey you…wanna hear a great stock tip?
Peanut butter.
Yeah, that’s what I said. Peanut butter.
Why?
Well it’s not insider information, that’s for sure. It’s common sense.
I paid $10 this morning to put 3.76 gallons of regular unleaded into my car so I could get to work. $10 used to be just below the full line. Now it’s barely to 1/2 a tank. So I used to have more money to spend on eating out at lunchtime. No big fancy restaurant or anything, just away from work and the work crowd. I would do that once a pay period, sometimes twice. So, that was $20 or $30 a month I spent to keep the economy rolling.
Now I put that $20 or $30 into my gas tank to keep OPEC and George W. Bush’s oil pals well fed while I eat in the building.
As I said, peanut butter is the coming thing. The stock in peanut butter should be going through the roof soon because I am not the only one who is cutting back on lunch expences. Right now I am still able to afford lunchmeat, but as transportation costs and energy costs rise I will be looking for alternate foods that don’t cost an arm and a leg to refrigerate and transport. Lunch meat is perishible. Peanut butter is not.
So, if I wanted to make a killing in the stock market equal to the killing the oil barons are making I have to do it soon. Investing in peanut better may be the wave of the future. Get in now on the ground floor before the prices of it go up too and you’re priced right out of the market
Investors (and politicians), take note.
According to PrawfsBlawg: Things to ask (or not to ask) your new prawfs, someone actually asked newly minted Prof. Leib,
“Professor Leib, many of us are concerned that you’ve never taught a day in your life. What do you have to say about that?”
It’s a really dumb question. First, because it’s too late to do anything about it. Second, because new teachers are sometimes at their best — fresh with new ideas from practice or the academy, full of energy, innocent of the mind-numbing horrors of faculty meetings.
Then, again, some of us improve. I think (hope) I probably teach better now than when I started (and I had a tiny amount of pre-law school teaching experience), in part because I have a slightly more realistic sense of how much (little) can be accomplished in a semester. Perhaps it’s all reversion towards the mean.
Bruce Schneier has a good analysis of the latest horrible idea to emerge from the TSA.
Schneier on Security: Secure Flight News
According to Wired News, the DHS is looking for someone in Congress to sponsor a bill that eliminates congressional oversight over the Secure Flight program.
The bill would allow them to go ahead with the program regardless of GAO’s assessment. (Current law requires them to meet ten criteria set by Congress; the most recent GAO report said that they did not meet nine of them.) The bill would allow them to use commercial data even though they have not demonstrated its effectiveness. (The DHS funding bill passed by both the House and the Senate prohibits them from using commercial data during passenger screening, because there has been absolutely no test results showing that it is effective.)
In this new bill, all that would be required to go ahead with Secure Flight would be for Secretary Chertoff to say so.
There’s lots more.
Jotwell Blenderlaw