The estate of Marion Barry is suing his kidney donor.

Washington state looks to have a 75mph speed limit. Welcome (back) to the west, Washington! Seriously, the low statewide speed limit happens when a majority of people in the state live in a place where something is appropriate for that part of the state and not necessarily the state as a whole.

Even though they tend to be net beneficiaries of tax dollars, I often wonder if secondary and smaller cities in populous states like New York, California, and Illinois would be better off if they weren’t anchored to those cities. Articles like this touch on why.

Sean Kemp argues that British politics are too obsessed with American politics.

Henry Rayhons, the guy who was arrested and charged with having sex with his wife (who had dementia) in a nursing home, was acquitted.

The System must be preserved, demonstrable innocence be damned.

Former Corinthian graduates are going on student loan strikes, while another is suing. But the colleges are shutting their doors.

Liberty University is the first FBS school to announce that it’s going to pay its students athletes the full cost of university attendance. Notably, they’re also the FBS school most anxious to move up in to the FCS.

Meanwhile, Colorado State, which like a great many schools is looking to upgrade from G5 to P5, is taking on a whole lot of debt on a bond to build a new football stadium, in addition to a plethora of student-related goodies like luxury dorms and student centers. Louisiana State, on the other hand, can’t even get a bond.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Scooter Libby got screwed.

No serious harm was meant, and no damage was done, but let’s go ahead and charge an eighth grader with felony hacking.

Jason Rabedeaux was once an attractive rising star in the world of college basketball coaching. He was found dead, fat, and wasted away in Saigon.

I recently listened to a graphic audio that was incredibly painful. It was simultaneously so busy that I had no idea what was going on, yet also quite boring. But I had to see it through to the end. Because of that, this story about “purge-watching” (as opposed to binge-watching) really resonated.

Russell Saunders got his first mammogram.

Take a quiz to find out who you should be rooting for in the UK elections! It includes a question on “non-domicile status” which I happened to read an article on a couple weeks ago.

Alex Massie writes about the two tribes of Scotland, and how the Scottish independence movement isn’t over. Meanwhile, Janan Ganesh and Daniel Larison think that English impatience is the greatest threat to the United Kingdom.

Out of nowhere, earlier in the week, my Note 4’s camera went on the fritz. Basically, holding the camera reasonably steady, photos started looking like this:

And videos like this:

It was doing this across different camera apps (“A Better Camera” is a good app, if you’re curious), suggesting that it wasn’t a minor software glitch.

Now, there are some features on my smartphone I can do without. For at least a little while. The camera, at this time in my life, is not one of them. The ability to take pictures in a matter of seconds is very important when you’re the father to a two-and-a-half year old girl who happens to be the cutest and most amazing in the universe.

So I found myself wishing that if some core functionality had to go, why couldn’t it just be the ability to make and receive calls?! That I could do without for a while as I try to figure out what the problem is. But camera? I might as well switch to the S5 I use as a backup. That would also allow me to do a factory reset of the Note 4. Which I did, and the problem persisted.

The Quality Assurance dude in me appreciated that the error was so reproducible. Reliable errors are the best errors. But what to do? This was evidently a hardware problem.

My childhood best friend words at Problem Resolution at Verizon, my provider. So I asked him what to do and he recommended I call Verizon. Which I did. And let me tell you a thing or two about their customer service…

It was friendly, sometimes exceedingly so. The woman acted like a dead phone was the Worst Thing In The Universe, even though I was pretty nonchalant about it by the time I called them. This is what I keep the S5 around for.
It was helpful. While we were waiting, she took the opportunity to look over my account. I feared having to fend off some upselling, but she actually tried to downsell me, informing me that we are on a much higher plan than we need to be. I appreciated it, but our use is erratic and I never want to be in the situation of scrambling to upgrade again, even if it costs a bit extra per month. I like not having to worry about it, but it was great that she asked me about it while we were killing time.
It was helpful. I had a problem, with a minimum of fuss and didyatrys. I was kicked up once, but it was pretty quickly established that they would have to send out a new phone.

This could all go to pot if – after I send them my present phone – they say something like “the warranty isn’t valid because you damaged the phone” (I didn’t). It’s also, by a stroke of luck (and Verizon’s stiff measures) not rooted, which kept the warranty valid through no choice of my own.

So the phone is going to be arriving this weekend. I want to be excited about it, because I always love getting new stuff, but this is going to be the exact same phone I currently have (albeit with a working camera).

In the meantime, I am reminded why I upgraded from the S5. If you’d have told me five years ago that I would be upgrading from a phone with a 5″ screen because the screen was too small, I’d have thought you were crazy. I can’t wait to know what kind of phone I will have five years from now. (Though, alas, it probably will not have a removable battery. Sigh.)

Paul Krugman makes the following observation about Atlas Shrugged:

After all, what is Atlas Shrugged really about? Leave aside the endless speeches and bad sex scenes. What you’re left with is the tale of how a group of plutocrats overthrow a democratically elected government with a campaign of economic sabotage.

As it happens, I watched the third and final movie recently, which has it fresh on my mind. As I watched it, the phrase “economic terrorism” came to mind, with regard to Galt’s tactics. The book does attempt to establish the moral basis for what it’s doing, with the pirate only sinking ships of ill-gotten gains and Wyatt and d’Anconia destroying what was theirs to destroy. From a certain vantage point – Rand’s – doing anything else out of kindness or decency would have been the self-treachery of living for another man.

Nonetheless, I found Wyatt’s actions distasteful, and it was something I never quite got over and never could square with my most libertarian of instincts.

That being said, Krugman’s argument here is even more of a stretch than Jonathan Last’s seminal piece in defense of the empire from Star Wars. Even from a liberal prospective, and no matter how much one disagrees with Galt’s (and Rand’s) solution, the democratically elected government of Atlas Shrugged was rotten to the core.

That touches on a comment I made from a previous post on the book:

By far, the most surprising thing to me – perhaps the only really surprising thing – was the extent to which the villains were roughly as wealthy and individually powerful as the heroes. The poor were the hordes at the gate, but collectively a villain in the background. The bigger villains were corrupt businesspeople, unions, and the government they were propping up. The unions being there weren’t a surprise, obviously, but I wasn’t expecting corrupt and self-serving businesspeople to get much more than a passing mention, if any at all.

It’s not just that the Thompson regime was liberal and socialist and ideologically bad (from Rand’s POV), but they were hopelessly corrupt. They had their blindness, but it was pretty transparent from the book that the ideology was a means to an end. Not even along the usual critique, which is that they use big government to become powerful, which they then use to increase their own wealth relative to everyone else. They’re shoplifting on a sinking ship, after having stolen the floorboards, but they were lining their pockets as best they could. The government presented isn’t just a failure by conservative or libertarian standards, but by liberal ones as well.

Which gets us to the “democratically elected” part. While it is presumably true that Thompson was elected, it’s difficult to ascertain the circumstances surrounding it. Putin was elected, and would almost certainly be elected in a free and fair election, but there’s enough going on to cast a shadow over the entire regime. Once incumbents have enough power, even accurate elections are somewhat beside the point. And you can have multiple candidates that are essentially fronts for the same regime. Which is a criticism I hear of the American system… from people on the hard left as much as anywhere else. The legitimacy of the regime is in question.

Democracy may be better than the alternatives, but it does not render corruption legitimate. And corruption that runs deep enough can, under at least some circumstances, render legitimacy to a coup. Or at the very least can justify a war of secession. Which is kinda sorta what’s going on.

From an ideologically secular standpoint, Atlas Shrugged would, to me, be a more interesting book if it actually did involve familiar states (either of the nation-state or the state-state variety). If, say, Galt and company were to relocate to Washington or Oregon instead of Colorado and set of a Free State sort of deal, with an eye towards independence. And in the time and place of the novel, both in our timeline and theirs, it would be incredibly difficult for a western Freedonia to gain a foothold. It would be giving their opponents a nation to attack, after all. On the other hand, with sufficient economic sabotage and stealth…

Such a plot runs counter to Rand’s political thesis, though, so from an ideologically sectarian standpoint it’s a non-starter. It also, at least arguably, points to a flaw in the hyperlibertarian model, which is that freedom needs to be defended. That requires organization. If not conscription, then a lot of people. More people than could ever meet the stiff threshold of the competence required to be invited to Rand’s Atlantis.

Will Wilkinson (H/T Dave Pinsen) said the following:

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.

Willers is, of course, left behind right next to Hannity and Beck. The problem is that you would need Willers – an army of him, really – to be able to secure the sort of (dare we say it?) state from future pilfering. In addition to the magic power generator that Galt built, there is also the magic cloaking device. Which may work, for a time as the pieces of the former United States of America rebuild. But eventually they will. And though Galt imagines a confederacy of colonies, eventually a society will rebuild and conflict will erupt. Probably a fascist one. A Monroe Republic. And while it might take them longer to find the hidden colonies than the Free State of Washington, find it they eventually would. The only defense would be the equivalent of Project X in the hands of the Atlantians.

Which leaves Atlas Shrugged ultimately as a contest between the corrupt government of ruin, or the likely promise of ruin in the future. Whatever the morality of the cause, it’s difficult to entirely shrug off the looters and the moochers, when they have you so severely outnumbered.

-{Ed note: The bulk of this was written a few weeks ago. It got lost in the shuffle.

A little while back I had a flashback post to old promos for fall seasons of ABC and Fox. Here’s one for just about every network:

The legend of used panty machines in Japan is perhaps more fiction than fact. Oh, well. Happosai was still kinda cool.

John Nova Lomax writes about the deliberate transformation of Texas from a southern state to a western state. I don’t blame Texas for wanting to move past its confederate associations. Would that more states had a way of doing that. I’m far more perplexed by people in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia who seem to feel some allegiance to something they should be trilled that they weren’t (technically) a part of.

David Wheeler argues that Silicon Valley has declared war on Millenials.

New research suggests “plain packaging” on cigarettes reduces smoking’s appeal to teenagers. Which I thought was cool because I am down with plain packaging laws. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be talking about “plain packaging” as much as “revolting packaging.” Fortunately, we’re less likely to find that horror porn come to fruition over here.

I bet you want to see some hilariously bad Kindle book covers, so here you go.

Sarah Rainey writes in the Telegraph about the Nazi Bride Schools.

I am not surprised that support for government redistribution is falling among the elderly (a lot of what they get, they don’t see as such), but I am a bit surprised about African-Americans.

It’s really, really difficult to describe why exactly watching little ones can be as exhausting as it is. There’s just nothing to compare it to. Here’s some research.

As the university becomes marketized, perhaps we should embrace a model where some students have to go to chapel, and others to workshops.

Todd VanDerWerff makes the case that the best sitcom of the ’90’s was NewsRadio. I’m not sure if it was the best – there’s a lot of competition – but it’s up there.

Caste-based discrimination is helping Christianity convert Indians.

Homekist crackers – which may be a Walmart housebrand as I have never found them anywhere else – are about half the price of even the cheapest of other saltines. You might be thinking “you get what you pay for” and… you’d be half-right.

The odd thing about Homekist crackers is that they have almost no quality control. I don’t mean that they’re terrible. I mean they are terribly inconsistent. They may be the most inconsistent packaged food I’ve ever purchased.

A good batch is as good as any name brand saltine out there. Better than most. Really good. Crispy. Great.

A bad batch is just terrible. They come out of the packaging half-stale. They’re cracked and broken. Sometimes you will lose up to a fifth or so of them to being only suitable for soup because they’re so crushed.

And there is no way of knowing which kind of batch you are going to get. There are some batches that are in between, but they mostly gravitate towards the great and the terrible.

Speaking of Walmart crackers, their reduced fat “Thin Wheats” are better than Wheat Thins.

Last week, Tod Kelly and I both wrote about some goings-on in Parma, Missouri, where the town elected a black mayor and suddenly everybody quit. We both suspected that it was mostly corruption with a side of racism. It turned out to be mostly petty small-town politics (though with perhaps a more generous helping of racism).

Which brings us to Kinloch, Missouri, where another newly elected black mayor has run into some resistence:

Betty McCray was not only prevented from entering city hall, she was also told she’d been impeached before she got a chance to start.

McCray ran for mayor in the April 7 election and won.

“I won. The people spoke,” McCray said. “I was sworn in by the St. Louis County. Today I take office. I want them out, I want the keys.”

After the election results were certified earlier this week by the St. Louis County Board of Elections, Kinloch’s outgoing administration refused to allow the city clerk to give McCray the oath of office, claiming voter fraud.

“Today is the first day that that the city hall door has been unlocked. They keep it locked,” McCray said. “You got to beat and you got to bang (to get in). They have an officer police sitting right at the door.”

Given that Kinloch is overwhelmingly African-American, this is likely a dish made almost solely of petty small-town politics and/or corruption.

Remember when we were talking about Parma having 6 officers for 700 people? Kinloch has 20 for 300. To be fair, that is likely to be a holdover from when Kinloch had a population in the thousands, twenty-five years ago.

In late 2013 and early 2014, there was a big to-do in Kinloch when a previous mayor, Darren Small, was removed from office by a judge after pleading guilty to a failure to pay child support. The interim mayor, Theda Wilson was arrested when she called the police about a burglary. She then made moves to abolish the police department, but Small was apparently reinstated before that happened.

Unlike Parma, which is strictly rural, Kinloch is a suburb of St. Louis and near St. Louis’s primary airport, which used to be called Kinloch field. Here’s a picture of Teddy Roosevelt at Kinloch Field:

How two similar-looking black men with the same name gave birth to the process of fingerprinting in criminal justice.

A speculative look back on what the Martian ocean may have looked like.

Leonard Pitts laments the equating of politics and moral character.

Jon Cryer wrote an autobiography where he talks about watching the meltdown of Charlie Sheen.

New York has high cigarette taxes, which results in a significant black market. Much of which comes from Virginia. So what responsibility, if any, does Virginia have here? There are some interesting parallels here with NY:VA::USA:Mexico.

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that our county isn’t on this list of fast-growing exurbs of DC.

Heather Gerken and James Dawson explain the virtues of spillover state laws, which is when a law in one state has an effect on another. They approve! As a would-be federalist, so do I.

As we’ve transitioned from cigarettes to smartphones, William Davies wonders what we lost along the way.

Brandy Zadrozny vs Liz Pardue-Schultz on whether or not stay-at-home mothers should be able to call what they do a “job.”

The stereotype is of women whose biological clocks are tick-tick-ticking trying to convince reluctant men to have kids, but that’s not always how it works and in fact it more often works the other way. I know in my life, where there has been a disparity, it’s usually been the women that are more reticent than the men.

Everything you may have wanted to know about chasing gravitational waves.

Canada appears to be (formally) opening the door to ecigarettes.

Jesse Walker argues that Philip K Dick was right, the fear shouldn’t be that robots will become more man-like, but that we will be reduced to robots.

Good news! Japan may have passed peak suicide.

Officials in South Carolina and elsewhere have been very concerned about the illegal exporting of automobiles. Coincidentally, they’ve been seizing said luxury automobiles. The good news (depending on your POV) is that they’re backing off.

In a restaurant review that isn’t really a restaurant review, Jack Baruth investigates the male privilege of potential invisibility.

I don’t really buy Cyanogen’s alleged plan to steal Android from Google. I just don’t see how they get passed the referenced 800-pound entity. Judging by the closing, it seems like Cyanogen may feel the same way. Which is unfortunate, in a way, because some of the forced tying-in is beginning to grate. (I wouldn’t mind Google wanting me to use their products if their products were actually better or as-good as the alternatives.)

On paper, Sleepless in Seattle had serious problems. It’s a testament to the power of the Hanks-Ryan chemistry that it was as well-regarded as it was.

It’s Dawn on Ceres, as we look at the universe’s leftovers.

If they aren’t interested in taking over Pitcairn, maybe would-be seasteaders need to cozy up to the Chinese, offering to be human flagpoles in exchange for relative independence!

While Stand Your Ground laws can go too far, sometimes the laws governing how we can protect ourselves go too far in the other direction. In both The Practice and Boston Legal, there were episodes relating to a burden of proof for self-defense that I found troublesome, as their freedom depended on whether or not they could demonstrate that the deceased was moving in their direction.

I attribute one of the dumbest things ever said in politics to Fritz Hollings (D-SC), and his work on copyright has lead to infuriating results, but be can be so dang earnest sometimes. (No pun intended.) I can’t reveal it, but there’s a touching story involving him and someone that I know.

Is a five-year old Oklahoman a reincarnated film actor? (What’s odd about this link is that I’ve gotten it on Facebook, from about four okies that I know. All of whom are super-devout Christians.)

Mapping East Middle Earth.

Parma, Missouri, (pop 700) has a new mayor! Suddenly, though, they are without a police department and several other key officials:

Voters in Parma, Missouri voted in their first African-American female mayor.

Tyrus Byrd will be sworn in as mayor on Tuesday evening, April 14, at the Parma Community Building.

According to Mayor Randall Ramsey, five out of six police officers resigned this week, effectively immediately.

Mayor Ramsey said the city’s attorney, the clerk and the waste water treatment plant supervisor also turned in resignation letters citing “safety concerns.”

This is being portrayed as largely a racism or racism/sexism issue. I find myself thinking that there is more to it than that. The first thing is that… a town of 700 people has six officers? Really? Why? Even residents of Parma don’t seem to know:

Some say they’re not worried about their safety and it wasn’t necessary to have that many on staff for a city the size of Parma.

Some say they’re relieved about the situation and that Parma doesn’t have that many problems in town to require so many officers.

“I think it was pretty dirty the way they all quit without giving her a chance, but I don’t think they hurt the town with quitting because who needs six police for 740 people?” said Martha Miller of Parma.

Then there were the other officials. The city’s computers were apparently wiped on exit.

This doesn’t sound like run-of-the-mill racism (though it could be that in part – it often is with good ole boy networks). This sounds like corruption. The king is gone, so the kingsmen are heading for the hills either because the gang is up or to create a crisis to put the king back in power (at the next election – this metaphor has limitations). There is a good chance at least some of these people were getting paid to do very little, and since the gig was up, they were going to move on one way or another and this allowed them to do it on their own terms.