Would the people bashing women who buy expensive handbags instead of knock-offs say the same about someone who bought paintings instead of posters to decorate his home? When you buy fashion, sometimes you are purchasing both a work of art and a functional item.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 3:10 PM on June 27, 2007

At the risk of being pilloried: shouldn't kids be able to identify whether something is alive? And since when is buying a car something that kids don't care about? I'm sure the test prep is mind-numbing (I took TAAS in school and no doubt it's at least that bad), but the cheating problem would exist absent standardized testing; it was endemic at every school I attended after 5th grade and it's a lot easier to tell that there's cheating with TAKS than determining if one kid's been copying another... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 6:02 AM on June 4, 2007

This makes it easier to dismiss complaints at the pleadings stage.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 3:24 PM on May 21, 2007

In Chile or Nicaragua, this woman would have died. Not all of the "pro-life" policies make an exception for the life of the mother.

If you read the comments ot the post, a lot of people share personal stories. There's an example of a woman who could have carried to term, at the cost of losing kidney function and having to go on dialysis for the rest of her life. That should never have to happen. That is why a health exception is necessary.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:15 PM on April 26, 2007

Double.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 4:31 PM on April 22, 2007

Why didn't they give him a prosthesis?
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:24 PM on January 29, 2007

I found usage of the "pink blazer" term from 2003.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:19 PM on August 28, 2006

I prefer Hopkins's earlier poems. They can be hard to find, since some of them were about his love for another Oxford student and he didn't want them distributed. An example:

The Beginning of the End

My love is lessened and must soon be past.
I never promised such persistency
In its condition. No, the tropic tree
Has not a charter that its sap shall last

Into all seasons, though no... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 7:44 AM on August 22, 2006

Re: Cassie Claire: she's also attempted to purge her NC-17 Harry/Draco slash (1, 2) from the internet now that her Young Adult fantasy novel is being professionally published.

I agree that the reporter should have done some research on fandom and read more of the books beforehand instead of going for the cheap, context-free "look at the freaks!" angle. That would not have necessarily yielded a positive spin to the piece, but at least it would have been more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 9:08 AM on August 13, 2006

Menstruation might cause part of the gap between men's and women's earnings! But there's hope: the Liberation may come.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 1:54 PM on August 3, 2006

Here is a great Catan t-shirt.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 9:48 AM on July 8, 2006

I wish the men who prey on young girls were the ones the mothers went after with hot stones.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 1:35 PM on July 7, 2006

There was some interesting litigation dealing with the establishment of an eruv in New Jersey. The town selectively enforced an ordinance so the eruv could not be attached to utility poles, while lost dog posters and the like got a pass. The Third Circuit said that violated the First Amendment. Here's a link to the opinion (pdf).
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 1:30 PM on July 7, 2006

Living somewhere conducive to "building community spirit across class and race lines" is not the same as having close friends. Friendships with people similar to yourself are not worthless.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 9:19 AM on June 23, 2006

Here is a review of the Anonymous Lawyer book by someone who actually knows something about law firms. He's not impressed.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:36 PM on June 3, 2006

Justices do occasionally hire dissenting clerks; Scalia, for example, had Larry Lessig and Christine Jolls as clerks, and you couldn't call either a conservative. (And thanks for the link, monju_bosatsu!)
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 11:39 AM on February 15, 2006

esquire, Saucy is mostly right. Only a few of the clerks hired for next term are not recent law school grads, for example. There has been a trend toward hiring more mature and experienced clerks in recent years (Professor Orin Kerr clerked for O'Connor in OT 2004, IIRC), but the stereotypical bright-eyed Ivy grad with little legal experience remains the rule, not the exception.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 1:51 PM on February 15, 2006

Wow, one whole year of legal experience counts as more than a little? Especially if that one year is at a firm, where you're probably doing monkey work and training, color me unimpressed.

You do have me on Kerr's clerkship year. He took me on a tour of the Court, but I forgot which summer it was.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:04 PM on February 15, 2006

esquire: I admit to having totally flubbed re: Kerr. However, you haven't produced any evidence that my generalization about most clerks having "little" legal experience beyond clerking is false. A year or two = little, in my view, especially if the experience is as an associate at a law firm and doubly so if you're considering the experience level at the time the clerkship starts, not the time of hiring. People who completed an appellate clerkship in summer 2005 and are hired by a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:39 PM on February 15, 2006

Profiles of Scalia's current clerks are here. "All four are conservative white males."
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:53 PM on February 15, 2006

subtle-t, A3G's characterization was based on their feeder judge pedigree, and Kozinski does not only hire conservatives (he hired Heidi Bond from Michigan, and she's pretty liberal). Maybe you have unmasked a counterclerk.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 3:09 PM on February 15, 2006

You said some. I said little, because I thought your description overstated the amount of legal experience most Supreme Court clerks have. You said little was wrong. I tried to define little, and you now say you're not interested in what little means. You don't care about looking at data, and you refer to previous years' classes of clerks but refuse to provide citations. Based on the OT 2005 and 2006 classes, I stand by my characterization of the legal experience level of most Supreme Court... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 4:01 PM on February 15, 2006

A non-dickish response would be to say "Scott Martin is a current counterclerk." (If that's true.) Or even: "Gil Seinfeld was a counterclerk in OT 2002." Both have the virtue of being clear and more than marginally informative. You keep insinuating that you know more than the other people in this thread, but you haven't been backing up anything with specifics.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 5:32 PM on February 15, 2006

Awesome post, and RIP, Judge Richard.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:20 PM on February 13, 2006

The Full Faith and Credit Clause has always been subject to the "public policy exception," which permits states to refuse to recognize or enforce the pronouncements of another state if they have a strong public policy against doing so. This has been recognized repeatedly during the same-sex marriage debates. If Nebraska has a strong, extant, articulated public policy against adults having sex with 13 year olds (which it apparently does) it need not recognize their marriage at all.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 3:49 PM on February 8, 2006

Their service was a ripoff and I'm not surprised to hear that they're shutting it down. I sent a telegram to a former boyfriend in 2004 and they charged an arm and a leg, got the message wrong, had terrible customer service, and only delivered during business hours M-F. Additionally, they outsourced delivery to DHL, so it's not like you got a cheery guy in a Western Union uniform ringing your doorbell and handing you a telegram; instead a DHL truck pulled up, shoved a standard business envelope... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 10:16 AM on February 1, 2006

The sparing of the cook is interesting when compared with the cannibalism by the crew of the whaleship Essex, in which the first four men to be eaten were African-American.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 10:13 AM on January 8, 2006

It's not really accurate to say that her father helped her cover it up; it sounded more like she was alternatively suicidally hysterical and borderline catatonic after coming out of her shock trance and the parents and her sister's fiance did the work of hiding and cleaning the car. She wanted to turn herself in and her parents talked her out of doing so, at least until she had a lawyer. When faced to choose between the law of her community and the injunctions of her parents, the latter... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:44 PM on December 28, 2005

The Purple Cow
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:07 PM on November 26, 2005

NY Times is reporting 31 dead in that nursing home.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 10:12 AM on September 4, 2005

That's even uglier than the ads would be, if only because of the unfortunate choice of color.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 2:43 PM on August 10, 2005

lodurr, the commenters on Making Light combed Tessy's entire blog for any entries about her job with Olen (results here and here).

The reason people haven't given any examples of confidences betrayed is that there weren't any.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 7:02 AM on July 20, 2005

To teach a beautiful young girl what is perhaps the ugliest and most brutal "sport" in the world I find almost indescribably sad.

Would you be less sad if she was a homely young girl? What about a handsome young boy?
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 6:59 AM on July 11, 2005

Girls who participate in sports are less likely to get pregnant or use drugs. From here:

The positive effects of sports on grades are especially pronounced among Latinas, the ethnic group with the highest teen birth rate.

Seniesa's dad is a deeply imperfect person, but he's got Olympic dreams for his daughter. Compare this to her mother, who wants her to be a cheerleader and get interested in boys. Sounds like a one-way... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:30 AM on July 11, 2005

Look, delmoi, the girl is from a seriously disadvantaged background and an unstable home. Do you really think she's better off experimenting with heroin like her dad than boxing? Or better off having sex younger? Do you honestly think that this family is going to give the girl a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and get her on the Pill? That doesn't seem to be happening for most Latina girls.
(And my high school had its share of knocked up cheerleaders, so I'm just extrapolating from... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 6:13 PM on July 11, 2005

Texas does not have a state income tax.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:00 PM on May 12, 2005

I found this to be the most disturbing sentence in the entire article:

Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 9:32 AM on May 8, 2005

thomcatspike, if you live near a state line and the closest major metro area is in the other state, you are quite likely to have to do so.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 4:02 PM on April 27, 2005

IndigoJones: 24, with parents who ran up 60-70K in credit card debt over the course of their marriage, which then promptly imploded. After the divorce (I helped out in the division of property by splitting up the debts: Sears card for dad, Penney's for mom, etc.), the credit card companies called half a dozen times a day; to this day I hate it when the phone rings a lot. That was ten years ago. This year my mother finally paid off the consolidation loan her parents had to go out on a limb and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 7:48 PM on April 25, 2005

I am genuinely curious, dame—are you arguing that we all have some sort of moral entitlement to both a job we enjoy and whatever level of creature comforts we require to be happy? You’ve taken some steps to make your choice of job less burdensome, but the longer you go on consuming more than you earn the greater debt you will accumulate. Will you still be joyful when you are old and owe some massive sum to creditors? How does your refusal to choose affect your future prospects for retirement?
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 9:37 AM on April 26, 2005

sorry for the misunderstanding re: your repayment rates. I suppose the problem is that "a reasonable level of creature comforts" is contextual and changes over time; few of us would want to retire and have our current standard of living, if everyone 50 years in the future is zipping around in flying cars and watching virtual reality TV. That's the sort of goad that makes me worry about saving now, along with the possibility that something could happen that would make it difficult or... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 11:49 AM on April 26, 2005

In this profile of Andrea Levy, prizewinning British author, she admits to having learned how to tell stories from watching TV (she never read a book all the way through until she was 23) and that she can spot other authors of her generation who have done the same. I found this appalling. Then again, I'm one of those snobs who doesn't watch TV.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 6:27 AM on April 25, 2005

I understand that Hiibel's holding is narrower than that, IshmaelGraves. It says that in the context of a Terry stop (which must be based on "a law enforcement officer?'s reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in criminal activity"), the target of the Terry stop can be required to identify himself. If there was no reasonable suspicion to instigate the stop, then you cannot be forced to show ID. Since it sounds like the cops here had no particular basis for stopping Bressi,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:30 PM on April 12, 2005

mek, it was a rape prosecution. It's very common for someone to plead to a lesser included offense. And there are plenty of reasons to allow a plea other than a weak case by the prosecution, like maybe a rape victim not wanting to relive the entire experience in the freaking courtroom. Maybe she thought the typical 5-11 year sentence for the lesser offense was sufficient punishment.

BTW, some states (although not Penn.) now do not have separate "rape"... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:38 PM on March 6, 2005

There's a difference between basing a sentence on future dangerousness or likelihood of recidivism and basing it on past actions that do not bear on those issues. Whether he does great work for brain injury patients is not indicative of whether he will rape again.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:26 AM on March 7, 2005

How could even the most incompetent and uncooperative police investigation suppress the victim's testimony? And there was not a single witness who could be called to confirm her story, if a woman's word is not enough?
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:18 PM on March 5, 2005

Okay, this article says she did testify. Were the apparently required four male Muslim witnesses lacking?
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 12:57 PM on March 5, 2005

For an exhaustive history of the filibuster and an argument in favor of changing Senate rules, see this recent article (warning: very large PDF).
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 10:52 PM on March 1, 2005

Just to add diversity:

0 on the Moral Order axis, -6.5 on the Moral Rules axis.

1. System: Conservatism, Liberalism
2. Variation: Economic Conservatism, Economic Liberalism
3. Ideologies: Conservative NeoLiberalism, Progressive NeoLiberalism
4. US Parties: Republican Party
5. Presidents: Ronald Reagan (90.89%)
6. 2004 Election Candidates: George W. Bush (76.93%), John Kerry (76.10%), Ralph Nader (57.55%)
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 8:18 PM on February 21, 2005

chuq, they only knocked on the doors of houses where lights were on. Their deranged wombat of a neighbor (home with her adult daughter and mother, by the way) had her kitchen light on, which was visible from the street.
posted to MetaFilter by amber_dale at 1:59 PM on February 5, 2005