6.30.2023

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




Even shootouts at Texas courthouse squares get lost in time. 


  • You don't see this every day: Shaquille O'Neill showed up in Paradise, Texas.

  • Affirmative Action was killed at the Supreme Court yesterday. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the decision, it is now clear that "constitutional law" is not law at all. It's politics and ideology.  

    • The newspaper of record isn't wrong: 

    • Justice Thomas, who is one strange guy, wrote a long concurrence.  But in trying to sound lofty, this a weird thing to say. Barriers don't matter? At all? 

    • Thomas can't like there now being a black woman on the court to counter him. She wrote:  

    • The satirical right wing site, the Babylon Bee, handled the decision with all the dignity you would expect. (Side note: The person retweeting it, Konni Burton, is a former elected -- and defeated -- Republican state senator from north Texas.)

    • Very legal nerdy stuff: The case was based on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause which certainly applies against the defendant University of North Carolina which is a public school. But how can the 14th Amendment apply against private defendant Harvard? We all know, for example, that First Amendment's free speech clause applies against the government and not private persons so why does the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause apply against Harvard here? The answer was buried in footnote 2.
  • The deputy who failed to act in the Parkland mass shooting was acquitted yesterday afternoon. I don't know what I think about this. 

    • I basically suffer vicarious trauma and anxiety whenever I watch any verdict being read, and the one in this case was really hard to take.  Video. But I really felt it for his lawyer. After the not guilty verdict on the first count, the defendant clearly thought he was going to also acquitted on all of the other counts. And he was right. But you can tell his lawyer knew that was not necessarily so, and he's riding that thing out with white knuckles as the other verdicts are read.

  • Good. Let's see it all.  

  • Sue the guy all you want, but this isn't a criminal matter. That being said, if you watch the documentary of his rise to fame, which was shot before the Astroworld concert, he certainly had been put on notice that his crowds tend to "surge forward" causing a dangerous situation. 

  • Tiffany's in Manhattan caught on fire yesterday.
     

  • I don't recall this happening as such a big level or at such speed: Overstock.com bought the name of Bed, Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million after the retailer went into bankruptcy, and now will simply change its own name.

  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office, despite having a full male DNA profile, has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 3 years, 361 days.