Coyote Blog

As many of my readers know, we run over 200 recreation facilities across the country, from Washington to Florida.  This experience of serving nearly a million customers a year has yielded some odd insights.  One of the ones I published before is that the far-and-away worst litterers in the country are Southern Californians and LA residents in particular, California-eco-speak notwithstanding. 

Another observation we have made is that many times our most difficult customers turn out to be law enforcement officers.  I'm not talking about all of them - the vast majority of law enforcement officers are friendly, peaceful campers.  But when we have an incident of a customer refusing to follow the rules and wanting privileges no one else gets, like-as-not the customer is a law enforcement officer of some sort.  For example, we have had an off duty law-enforcement officer pay for one campsite, and then spread his stuff out over three, and refuse to limit himself to one site or pay for the other two he was using.   We have had off-duty law enforcement officers who had their car towed because it was parked for four hours in a tow-away zone, and then had their on-duty friends show up (well out of their jurisdiction) and interrogate our managers and otherwise harass them in retribution.  Heck, we have biker gangs come through that are more respectful of authority than certain off-duty law enforcement officers.

This irritating little site (HT: Hit and Run) possibly explains some things for me.  The site is apparently run by cops and is aimed at criticizing cops who do not extend other officers "professional courtesy"  which apparently is a euphemism for "allow them to break the rules with impunity."  Police officers who actually have the temerity to enforce the rules on other police officers are singled out as "dicks."  Maybe I understand why some of our police officer customers are not accustomed to having to follow the same rules as everyone else.

This may be my new favorite tort:  (via Overlawyered)

A Pennsylvania man has sued search giant Google
for $5 billion, claiming that when his Social Security number is turned
upside down, "it is a scrambled code that does spell the name Google."
The handwritten complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Scranton
alleges that the U.S. Justice Department "is heading the investigation
into allegations of crimes against Humanity" involving Google's
founders and that the plaintiff's "safety is in jepordy."

Up next, the owner of Social Security number 71077345 sues Shell Oil for the same reason.

Unfortunately, in other tort news, this is not a laughing matter.  It is just plain stupid AG megalomania:

For a while now, lawyers in Minnesota, Oklahoma and elsewhere have been suing companies that make over-the-counter cold remedies containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine on the grounds that they were aware
some buyers were using the drugs as raw material for illegal
methamphetamine labs. Now such litigation appears to be gaining
momentum in Arkansas, where many county governments have signed up to
sue Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and other companies. "If successful,
it could open up litigation against manufacturers of other produce used
in making meth, such as drain cleaners and acetone."

One local judge discusses the case in a way that sounds like a commercial for the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes:

"What more could we have done with a million dollars a year for our
county? Would that have meant a half dozen more police officers? Would
that have meant a better solid waste program? Who knows, what could
your county have done with an extra million dollars," asked Judge Bill
Hicks of Independence County, a backer of the suits.

Not surprising, but certainly sickening:

They [the PMA GROUP]  sank $1,333,074 into the campaigns last year of 3
Democratic members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and
walked away with $100.5 million in defense earmarks for PMA clients,
Roll Call reported.

That means for every buck they spent, their clients got back $75.39. In less than 1 year.

The 3 Democratic rent-to-own congressmen are John
Murtha, Jim Moran and Peter Visclosky. These antiwar Democrats see
nothing wrong with steering military money to PMA clients.

And why not? PMA money made up 20% of Murtha's war
chest, 18% of the Moran money and 33% of the Visclosky dough. For 2008,
PMA already has steered $542,500 to the 3 amigos.

Related thoughts from Radley Balko:

So I guess once you're elected to Congress, you're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.   

Meanwhile, the same  Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world. 

You
have lawmakers who feel they're above the law. And who at the same time
are criminalizing anything and everything they find tacky, repugnant,
or immoral.

I hesitated to even post this link, because if you haven't been following the Rack & Roll / Manassas Park story for a while, it is so rich and convoluted that it's almost impossible to catch up.  Like starting to watch the Sopranos in the sixth season.  But Radley Balko has a long update.

Here is the short answer.  A group of folks in Manassas Park, VA, both in and out of the town government, want to take the land where the Rack & Roll pool club and bar sits for a lucrative off-track betting establishment.  As part of that effort, they have worked to deny the owner his liquor license and his business license.  The town has also harassed the club with numerous over-the-top raids, including a full-on 60-man SWAT raid.  The town has in the past tried to portray the club as a haven for drug dealing, in part by having police pay the club's bouncer to allow and/or encourage drug deals on the property and then tip police to them.

The owner has been standing up for himself, and has taken to video-taping the premises at all times and recording interviews with employees and customers.  A lot of the back story is here, start at the bottom.

In this most recent update, the owner addresses the other major charge being used to pull his licenses -- that he allowed lewd behavior on site, specifically girls flashing their boobs on the dance floor.  He has impressive evidence that he threw out anyone he caught doing so, and instructed his other employees to do the same.  In fact, the flashing seems to have occurred when the owner was not present, and was led and encouraged and photographed by the club's DJ.  Ironically, the DJ is the Manassas Park vice-mayor.  So the town is trying to shut the club down for activities opposed by the club's owner but encouraged by the town's own official.  Bizarre.  Now the town finds itself the proud owner of a file of soft-core child pornography, in the form of pictures from the club taken by their vice-Mayor of topless girls, several of whom may have been under-age  (apparently VA law allows under-age patrons as long as they are not served alcohol).

A while back, I mentioned that the police had, for the first time in my life, actually pursued and caught someone who had stolen my or my company's property.  The county has a process of notifying victims of progress in this case, and to this end I received a copy of their plea agreement.  They plead guilty to 2nd degree burglary, which the letter says is a "non-dangerous, non-repetitive 3rd degree felony".  However, I must not understand the word "non-repetitive" since the guilty parties plead guilty to five counts of this non-repetitive crime!

Here is one reason that my regard for the police has fallen over the years:  Since I was about 25, I have had about an equal number of traffic tickets and robberies.  I have had my car broken into on four separate occasions, and have had my garage burgled once, and have had my company's property broken into and robbed seven or eight times.  Over that same period I have probably had 8 or 10 tickets (though unfortunately four of them were in the same year, causing me to face losing my license).  Can you guess which category the police spent the most time on?

Let's take the most recent example of each.  On the ticket side, I was cited for not getting all the way into the right-hand turn lane before making my right turn (really).  It was about six in the morning.  The cop had obviously invested substantial time waiting at that corner, hoping to catch a miscreant.  Then, once citing me, he went through the trouble of making notes on the incident and then showing up on my court date and testifying from his notes to make sure I was punished for my crime.

OK, now the burglary side.  My car was broken into in a parking lot at night, and my golf clubs were stolen, ironically at the exact same corner where I was busted for making a sloppy right-hand turn.  I called the police.  I'll bet anyone who has experienced such a theft already knows what happened.  I begged and pleaded to get a police officer out to the scene of the crime.  Nope, sorry, too busy.  No one would even bother to show up.  I begged them, saying that there was a security camera and the crime probably was on tape -- nope, sorry.  To even get a police report in the system (which my insurance company needed) I had to go to the police station myself and fill out all the paperwork.  When I turned in the paperwork, I asked who would be working on the crime, and they just looked at me pityingly, like a small naive child.  Because, of course, no one was going to spend one second on the crime.  Just like no one had ever spent a single second investigating any other of the thefts of my property.

So do you see my reason for resentment?  I naively used to think that breaking and entering and theft were far worse crimes than making a poor right turn.  But, conservatively, America's combined police forces probably spent over thirty man hours making sure I was punished for my traffic violations, while they invested zero time solving a series of thefts.

So it was with dumb shock that I got the news that the Coconino County Sheriff's department had actually solved a petty theft case against my property in the Flagstaff area, had apprehended the criminals, and had recovered some of the stolen property.  Now granted, these thiefs were dumb as a post, left what was essentially a calling card on the site, and were convicted felons who were well known to the local police.  But still, credit where credit is due.  Thanks.  Finally.   

This is so wrong.  When possessing cash is a crime:

A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of
money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case
entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash
away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant
criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

I know what you are thinking -- there must be some other facts Coyote is leaving out that explain why a man should have his money confiscated for no other reason than he chose to keep it in cash.  Read the whole thing, because you won't find anything that makes this sane.  I do a lot of business down on the border, and get many Mexican customers (legally) visiting as a tourist.  Almost to a one, they show up with large rolls of cash.  Our preference for key fob credit chips and ubiquitous Visa cards is not shared by every other culture, and the desire to keep one's assets in cash should not be a crime (it may not be smart, but not a crime).  Hell, murderers have more protection under the law than this person carrying cash.

I would be interested to hear more about this from folks with a legal background, but I am surprised that an appeals court even has the purview to find that a crime exists when lower courts found none.  The problem here, I think, is that the cash can (legally, which is nuts) be seized and kept without a trial, just on the say-so of the police, who have the incentive to decide that the cash is seizable because they get to drop it into their budget pool.  So I guess the trier of fact is the police (?) and the lower court reversed the police decision and then the circuit court is reinstating it. 

This is just one example of the incredibly high price we pay in civil liberties for the war on drugs.  See this post to measure the countervailing benefits of the war on drugs.  Hat tip:  Catallarchy.

Update: Via Hit and Run, here is another nice feature of the war on drugs:

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That
puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo
ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities
authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

The law limits the
amount of pseudo ephedrine you can buy. Pseudo ephedrine is an
ingredient in medicines like Sudafed and Claritin-D, and it's also a
key ingredient in methamphetamines.

"It's the only allergy medicine that works for me "“ for my allergies," Tim explained.

The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

  That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

And off to jail he went, with no apologies:

But even if you're not making meth, if you go over that limit "“ of one maximum strength pill per day "“ you will be arrested.

  "Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely," Sandoval stressed.

Do you see the similarity in these two stories.  Two different people, both punished by the state for taking legal actions similar to those taken by drug dealers (holding cash and buying Claritin) with absolutely no evidence they in fact had anything to do with illegal drugs.  Next up:  Anyone driving a Porche 911 will be arrested since those cars are favored by drug dealers. 

Richard Paey lost his appeal, and so will likely spend the next 25 years in jail for self-medicating pain relievers.  All parties, both prosecution and defense, agreed the painkillers were solely for his use and no drug distribution was involved.  Of course, its for his own good.... somehow or other.

For most of this country's history, prison was for people being punished for hurting others.  Their incarceration protected the rest of society from them.  Today, though, we are increasingly filling the prisons with people whose actions affected only themselves.  In particular, thousands languish in jail for petty drug possession charges, crimes that if they hurt anyone, hurt only themselves.  (Drug war proponents argue that few go to jail for marijuana use.  Sortof.  Actually, only a small percentage of marijuana possession arrests go to jail,  but there are three quarters of a million marijuana arrests every year.  A small percentage of a big number is still a big number)

I am reminded of the old George Carlin joke "do you know the worst thing that can happen to a kid that smokes marijuana?  He can go to jail!"  I find this wholly parallel to Mr. Paey's situation.  The Florida legislature thinks Mr. Paey is ruining his life by using too many painkillers for his, uh, pain.  So their solution is to .. ruin his life even worse, by throwing him in the prison for the rest of his useful life.  Good plan.  Next up: lobotomies for people who still insist on smoking.

This is one of those tough cases made to make judges look bad.  The Florida legislature bent over backwards to make sure that judges had absolutely no discretion in reducing the sentences of people like Mr. Paey.  And the judges acknowledged they were beaten, and would have to let Mr. Paey's sentence stand.  Where are those activist judges when you need them?  Well, there was one in the dissent:

With no competent proof that [Paey] intended to do anything other
than put the drugs into his own body for relief from his persistent and
excruciating pain, the State chose to prosecute him and treat him as a
trafficker in illegal drugs. Instead of recognizing the real problem
and the real behaviors that led to his real crimes and holding him
appropriately accountable, the State decided to bring out the artillery
designed to bring down the drug cartels....

The sentence in this
case for a lone act"”the mere possession of unlawfully obtained medicine
for personal use"”is illogical, absurd, unjust, and unconstitutional...

I
suggest that it is cruel for a man with an undisputed medical need for
a substantial amount of daily medication management to go to prison for
twenty-five years for using self-help means to obtain and amply supply
himself with the medicine he needed. I suggest it is cruel for
government to treat a man whose motivation to offend sprang from urgent
medical problems the same as it would treat a drug smuggler motivated
to obtain personal wealth and power at the expense of the misery
his enterprise brings to others. I suggest that it is unusual,
illogical, and unjust that Mr. Paey could conceivably go to prison for
a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully  purchasing 100
oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at
knife point, stolen fifty oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to
children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist.

Update:  Radley Balko has more stories about ridiculous drug sentencing.  He also has comments on Paey's case:

I'd add only a few of things to Jacob's post
on Richard Paey's horrible story below.  First, Paey's 25-year sentence
stems from two troubling decisions on the part of the prosecutor.
Prosecutor McCabe threw the book at Paey because,  (1) he refused to
admit he's an addict (and he wasn't, any more than a diabetic is
"addicted" to insulin), and (2) because he'd done nothing wrong, he insisted on his constitutional right to a jury trial.  The latter is an absurdity that often creeps up in a modern criminal justice system so rife with plea bargaining.  Charge stacking"and overcharging, combined with the possibility that you could even get extra time even for the charges you're acquitted of, mean that insisting on exercising your right to a trial is usually going to cost you. 

Second, as I noted a few months ago,
when police apprehended this paraplegic, frail man -- along with his
wife and two kids -- they brought the SWAT team in full paramilitary
gear. 

And third, why after Paey talked with New York Times columnist John Tierney
did prison officials moved him to a higher-security prison, several
hours from his family?  Paey says it's because a guard complained
about  what he said to Tierney, and was punished.  If that isn't true,
it'd be interesting to hear the official explanation for
suspiciously-time decision to move Paey to a higher-security facility.

Police are getting way too aggressive with SWAT teams conducting raids for minor drug offenses.  Here is another story from Houston, via Tom Kirkendall:

Based on the evidence in the trash, a regional SWAT team arrived at
the home. Police say they knocked, waited 30 seconds, and then broke in
with guns and a concussion grenade. The house suffered $5,000 damage
and one officer shot and killed Margot's golden lab, Shadow, when
police say it charged toward one of the officers. What did officers
find inside?

"A joint half the size of my pinky fingernail and then one about
this big," she said, showing a length on her finger. "And not anywhere
near this big around."

We have the same problem with our egomaniacal sheriff in Phoenix.

The Ramsey family is back to OJ mode, bravely searching for the "mysterious third party" that killed JonBenet, since the Boulder police have dropped all charges against their latest suspect.  OK, I'll say it, I told you so.  We just have to keep looking for the mysterious stranger who happened to know the Ramsey's were southern, knew how large the Ramsey's bonus check was, knew that Ms. Ramsey used the back stairs rather than the front to come to breakfast, had the balls to remain in the Ramsey's house for hours writing the ransom notes and arranging the scene....

I'm not really into all that crime drama and true crime stuff.  I have not watched a singled episode of either CSI:Whatever or America's Most Wanted.  I don't even know what the whole Scott Peterson thing was about.  But from 1996 to 1999, I lived in Boulder, Colorado.  And for much of that time, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey dominated the news.  You may think you got tired of hearing about it, but in Boulder we lived in it like a fish lives in water.  There was no escaping it.  One could become an expert on the case just by osmosis.  The local paper seemed to have a whole section dedicated to the case.  The US could have invaded a small nation in Asia and I would have missed it in those years.

That being said, I can't believe this guy they arrested in Thailand did it.  Or at least did it alone.  There is just too much evidence in the case that if the murderer was not one of the parents, it at least had to be someone very close to the family.   I won't bore you with specifics:  If you don't know it all by heart, you certainly don't want to hear it from me.  But someone will somehow have to explain all the ransom note stuff.  Someone who knew JonBenet would have an incentive to fake up the ransom note as a way to create a motive for the killing that diverted police attention away from people close to the child (who are always the police's first suspects).  But why would a mysterious third party feel such a need, and how did the ransom demand exactly match the amount of Mr. Ramsey's recent bonus check?  And if the Ramseys are entirely innocent, they have a lot of explaining to do about why they did absolutely everything they could to impede the investigation into the daughter's death.   Already his story is breaking down.  I guess the guy could conceivably be involved but in that case expect the story to be bizarre.

Update: In searching for news on this case, I found this insightful analysis of her murder based on astrology:

This opposition squares another opposition: the
opposition between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun often represents the
father in a birthchart
and the Moon the mother, and here it appears that the father was the
more nurturing parent and the mother was more dominant. Jonbenet's Moon
conjuncts the Midheaven, or cusp of the tenth house of career and
public life, showing Patsy Ramsey (Moon) was instrumental in Jonbenet's
young stage life (having herself been a beauty queen). The Sun, or the
father, is conjunct the cusp of the fourth house of the home and
Jonbenet may have been close to her father, but the square of both Mars
and Pluto to both the father and mother archetypes (Sun and Moon) shows
that there was very little safety in the relationship with either
parent. Pluto in particular, when in challenging aspect to the Sun (the
essential Spirit) and the Moon (emotional security and safety), can be
deeply frightening and there is a sense that the parents, and life
itself, are dangerous.

LOL, this is only a short taste of a much longer analysis.

Yet another company is falling into what I call the franchise trap, as Krispy Kreme's woes continue, including closure of its Arizona stores.  Just about 5 years ago, I remember when they first showed up here in Phoenix - there were long lines and police directing traffic around the stores.  Now, they're dead.  And the corporate parent is struggling.

If memory serves, Boston Chicken (now Boston Market) and Jiffy Lube both had their corporate parents go into bankruptcy at the back end of their wild growth phases.  This is what I mean by the franchise trap:  Franchises generally start out as a single location that does well.  Wanting to grow quickly, and lacking the capital to build their own stores, they adopt a franchise model for growth.  Soon, wild growth may ensue if their concept is good, and they discover that selling franchises is more profitable than selling whatever they sold in the store.  Once the growth phase ends, though, they often hit an iceberg.  Inevitably, they find that many of their franchisees either can't cut the mustard or chose poor locations and go bankrupt.  In addition, they must make the transition back from growing by selling franchises to growing by incrementally improving the core business.  Many can't make this transition back, corporate bankruptcy ensues, and someone who is an operator rather than a franchise promoter comes in and cleans up the house.

Ted Frank has this update on Vioxx litigation, and it couldn't possibly be more depressing:

Take, for example, the last
case Merck lost, that of Leonel Garza in south Texas. Mr. Garza, who
was said by plaintiffs to have taken Vioxx for three weeks, was a
71-year-old overweight smoker, with high cholesterol, decades of heart
disease, and a history of a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, yet a
jury awarded his survivors $7 million in "compensatory" damages, and
punitive damages to boot

He goes on to recount the very reasonable suspicion that Garza may not have even taken Vioxx at all, as he never had a prescription and his doctor has denied that he passed Garza a series of free samples in little brown bottles.

So out of eleven cases that
have gone to trial or almost gone to trial, there is a reasonable
suspicion that plaintiffs faked Vioxx usage in as many as five of them.
How many more of the tens of thousands of pending plaintiffs have
similar flaws?

He concludes with this excellent point:

Perhaps appellate courts
will get around to correcting these travesties, but the plaintiffs' bar
is counting on enough bad verdicts to slip through the cracks to make
these cases profitable.

The equation of expected returns is certainly helped by the fact
that no one is even suggesting that presenting this sort of
questionable evidence is unethical, much less illegal. Drug safety is
important, but so are the health costs from vaccines and drugs not
marketed because of liability risks. If the judicial system cannot
police itself adequately, the question then becomes why we want to
entrust national drug safety policy to an elected judge and a handful
of randomly selected jurors in Starr County, Texas?

Props to Merck for fighting each and every case so far and resisting the mass tort pressure to start offering settlements to anyone who asks for one.

Both based on outside pressure (mostly from torts) and internal desire, universities are rapidly modeling themselves into mini-governments, really mini-super-nanny-states.  FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, observes of a recent gathering of University attorneys:

At one panel I attended, San Francisco lawyer Zachary Hutton explained
Williams v. Board of Regents, a recent case in which a University of
Georgia student alleged having been raped by two student-athletes while a third
student watched. The police charged the athletes with rape, and the university
decided not to conduct its own investigation until the criminal case was
resolved.

That turned out to be a mistake. The plaintiff then sued the university for
sexual harassment, and the 11th Circuit held this year that the university could
be liable because, by waiting to conduct an independent investigation until the
criminal case was resolved, it had exhibited deliberate indifference to the
alleged rape. "The court emphasized," Mr. Hutton told the college lawyers, "that
the pending criminal trial . . . did not affect the university's ability to
institute its own proceedings, and the criminal charges would not have prevented
future attacks while the charges were pending."

There are excellent reasons for the university not to conduct its own
investigation. For one thing, instead of police detectives and professional
prosecutors conducting the investigation, you are likely to get Campus Public
Safety and the Associate Dean for Student Affairs. How having inexperienced
college administrators and college safety officers conduct a rape investigation
is likely to benefit either the victim or the accused is beyond me. The
potential for violating the Fifth Amendment, damaging evidence, and coming to
wildly inaccurate conclusions is immense, and if any of these things were to
happen, the university would risk botching an important criminal case. Rape is a
serious crime; victims and the accused deserve better than college justice.

In some ways, this was even more illuminating of the drive to mini-nanny-statehood:

The most entertaining discussion I heard at the lawyers' convention
centered on what to do about facebook.com and myspace.com--how to prevent
slander, harassment and rumor-mongering on these online communities popular with
undergrads.

What these attorneys were talking about is wholesale regulation of online
speech. Slander is, of course, a tort, and engaging in slander or libel can get
a person sued. It's hard to see how or why a college should be involved in this,
though. If I libel someone online, it's the business of those affected, not the
college. As for harassment, one of its main characteristics is that the person
being harassed finds the harassing behavior hard to avoid. Unless the "harasser"
is hacking into the victim's MySpace page, it's hard to see how going to a
"harassing" website isn't completely avoidable. As for "rumor-mongering," horror
of horrors! Regulating that on a college campus will mean tripling the number of
administrators (and probably tuition), but I suppose no expense is too large to
make sure that everyone stays comfortable.

College campuses were probably among the first and most vociferous critics of GWB's various domestic surveillance programs.  Its interesting to see that while opposing such programs at the national level, they are crafting far more far-reaching speech monitoring and restriction programs on their own campuses:

The room was evenly divided: Some lawyers recommended ignoring the students' Web
sites unless something offensive was brought to administrators' attention, while
others suggested taking aggressive action....

By my calculations, if half the lawyers thought that "offensive" speech that is
reported should be punished, and half the lawyers thought that administrators
should spend their time cruising the websites and proactively stamping out
"offensive" speech, that leaves ZERO lawyers who believed that perhaps merely
"offensive" speech should be protected, as the First Amendment (at public
schools), or respect for fundamental freedoms (at all schools), requires.

Asymmetrical Information comments on Greg Mankiw by observing:

Harvard scores lowest in student satisfaction *and* enjoys the highest yield (%
of students admitted who attend) of any leading American university. How can the
same institution be so desirable and so disliked at the same time?

The data presented for is for the undergraduate school and my experience is with the graduate school of business, but I think some of my experience can still help answer this question.

At the time I attended, I was sure that the Harvard Business School (HBS) was the best place for me to attend.  I still think that is true.  First, it had (and has) a great reputation with both people hiring for jobs and the general public.  The Harvard diploma has power, power that hasn't lessened even 20 years later.  Second, it had a style that worked well for me personally.  I sat in on classes at other business schools, but HBS classes had an interactive, and often combative, style that I loved and thrived in.  Yes there was work, but the workload never was worse than my undergraduate school.  I would not change my decision.

That being said, while I have showered my undergraduate school with cash, Harvard has not gotten one dime from me.  Because as an institution, it sucked.  It had an incredible arrogance to it, often stating publicly that its customer was NOT the students, but was the businesses who hired its graduates and society at large.  And this was the attitude at the business school, which I was often told was the most student-friendly part of Harvard.  My college roommate Brink Lindsey apparently had a similar experience at Harvard Law, as he was part of a group that founded N.O.P.E., which stood for Not One Penny Ever (to Harvard).

At every turn, one ran into petty, stupid stuff that did nothing to contribute to the educational experience but were frustrating as hell.  The faculty was often arrogant and the administrative and housing staff uncaring. 

At the risk of sounding petty, I will share two examples.  These are small things, but are representative of hundreds of similar experiences over two years. 

• At winter break the first year, we were all given a "gift" of a coffee table book about Harvard.  Then, next spring, we all found a $100 charge on our spring term bill for this "gift"
• My Harvard dorm room had a broken heater in my second year.  It got so cold that ice formed on the inside of the windows.  After weeks of trying, we finally got a maintenance guy to come out.  He set a thermometer down in the center of the room and stared at it for ten minutes.  Then he picked it up and started to leave.  "Why are you leaving?" I asked.  He replied "Because its 53 degrees in here.  State law does not require us to fix the heating until it falls below 50."  I finally had to go to Walmart and buy several space heaters.  Several weeks later I was ticketed by the campus police for having a fire hazard -- too many space heaters.

I do not think it an exaggeration to say that had Harvard scoured every post office in the country for employees, it could not manage to provide worse customer service day-to-day.

And I think this is the answer to the paradox.  If you can tolerate the faculty arrogance, you can get a great education, but Universities are more than just a school.  For most students, Harvard is also their landlord, their only restaurant choice, their local police force, etc. etc.  And for all these other functions, they are terrible.

So we're going to build a wall and send an army to the border.

Maintaining a military to defend a group of people against outsiders who wish to use force against them is one of the core functions of government.  Even crazed libertarian anarcho-capitalists like myself concede it as a function of government.  If libertarians were to have their version of the ten commandments, the only phrase that would have to be on the stone is "Thou shalt not deal with thy neighbor through force or fraud."  The government maintains police and a military to handle the people who wish to violate this one commandment.

Throughout the years, countries have built armies and fortifications to defend against invaders who wanted to loot their lands, or steal their property, or impose their own version of racial or religious uniformity.  The US Army itself has fought for freedom, it has fought to restore democracy and individual rights, it has fought to stop genocides. 

Today, the US Army sallies forth again, to fight for and defend .... what? 

It fights to stop waves of Mexican immigrants that are dangerous because they ... want to freely exchange their labor with US Citizens?

It fights to protect Americans from ... competition for unskilled labor jobs?

It valiantly rides forth to make sure Americans never face the horror of ... interacting with someone with only broken English?

The soldiers racing to the borders are not fighting for me, because I am not in danger.  And neither is anyone around me here in Arizona -- no one from outside the border is threatening me with force or fraud (surprisingly frequent emailers sending me messages about Mexicans all being diseased criminals notwithstanding).  Its not like I live blithely ignorant of the border area in Kansas.  I life in Phoenix, and run businesses  right down on the border.  I don't feel a threat or danger.  In fact, the only danger I see is that the army may come down and drag families who are my friends out of their homes and out of the country (or into concentration camps, as one conservative writer longed for).

Immigration opponents are sometimes a little hazy about what danger they are trying to fix.  I agree there is a problem with the welfare state when it meets immigration, which I discussed here and proposed a solution for it here.  Democratic politicians still are confused on this particular problem, wanting some immigration solution but refusing to consider limiting access to the welfare state.   If the problem is infrastructure (police, prisons, schools, etc.) then it could be possible to provide national funds to border regions for this purpose, rather than for armies and walls (the Feds, after all, are handing out hundreds of billions to New Orleans).  And if the problem is too many people who don't look like us Anglo-Saxons, well, sorry  (If you don't think that this is the real issue for many anti-immigration folks, think about the recent scare headlines that soon a majority in the US may be Hispanic.  Can you imagine similar anxiety over the headline "majority of US may soon be of Canadian descent"?)

Update:  Nick Gillespie comments on the fact that Congress has given its official sanction to my speaking English.

Thank you, Middle Eastern 9/11 hijackers, for finally getting the point
through our thick skulls (forgive our slowness, but all too many of us are
descended from immigrants) that the greatest security threat to the United
States is the influx of Spanish speakers from across the border with Mexico.

Christ, it's bad enough that we have to eat foreign food, live in states
with Spanish-derived names, and answer that extra question about which
language to use at the ATM. (Thought experiment: How much is that extra
second or two of time slowing down the U.S. economy and driving down our
productivity, precisely at the moment when the Chinese are breathing down
our
necks like a bunch of post-industrial railroad coolies? You can be damn sure
that the Chinese government doesn't allow ATM users to pick their own
language.)

As I have written before, I have gotten more bizzaro emails on my pro-immigration stand than anything else I have written about.  Gillespie apparently has had the same experience.

Via Overlawyered, one of my absolute favorite blogs, comes my favorite headline of the week, courtesy of KCRA in California:

Paraplegic Activist Leaps From Wheelchair, Runs From Police

That's classic.  Apparently, the person involved had defrauded numerous organizations with spurious ADA complaints under California's ridiculous sue-anyone-with-higher-net-worth-than-yours laws.

Police said Laura Lee Medley, who repeatedly filed claims and lawsuits
for noncompliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, was a con
artist.

A San Bernardino County spokesman, David Wert, said
Medley had complained to police earlier that she was having medical
problems so she was taken to a hospital for treatment.

Wert said, "That's where the great miracle occurred."

Officers
said Medley, 35, leaped from her wheelchair and ran for freedom after
being placed under arrest by Las Vegas police. The barefoot woman was
caught after a brief pursuit.

According to authorities in
Southern California, Medley was never disabled but used her supposed
condition to file many medical claims and lawsuits. Her questionable
claims led to the arrest in Las Vegas.

The vast majority of my employees and many of my customers are over 60, so we try extra-hard to accommodate people with all kinds of disabilities.  That is why this type of fraud really burns me up.  Not once but twice we have killed incipient lawsuits when we have had customers who were claiming severe physical disabilities observed playing football or unloading a truck.  I have had one person I was interviewing for a job tell me that I had to hire him since he was disabled, because if I didn't choose him I would be discriminating against the handicapped (we chose a different candidate).

Update: More Unruh act silliness:

A Los Angeles psychologist who was denied a tote bag during a Mother's
Day giveaway at an Angel game is suing the baseball team, alleging sex
and age discrimination.

Michael Cohn's class-action claim in Orange County Superior Court
alleges that thousands of males and fans under 18 were "treated
unequally" at a "Family Sunday" promotion last May and are entitled to
$4,000 each in damages.

I think it was George Carlin (?) who used to ask "Do you know what the worst thing is that can happen when you smoke marijuana?" His answer was "Get sent to prison".  The implication, which I have always agreed with for most drug use, was that it is insane as a society to try to save someone from doing something bad to himself by ... doing something worse to him.

I think of this whenever I get in a discussion about security responses to 9/11.  The worst thing that can happen to this country as a whole  (as differentiated of course from the individual victims of 9/11) is to turn the country into a police state to combat potential future terrorist actions.  I personally would greatly prefer to live with a 1 in 100,000 chance of being the victim of terrorism than find myself living in an America that has abandoned its constitution.  I wrote more on this topic here.

To this end, though I tend to be slow to believe these type of stories, this one (via Reason) about domestic NSA wiretapping is pretty frightening:

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full
access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers'
internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in
its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T
worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against the company....

The source is just one low-level guy, so this story is still pretty soft.  I hope the investigation is allowed to play out.

In Florida, where there seems to be a substantial problem with people stealing property in the form of shopping carts from local merchants, the government has a solution: Fine the victims.

In theory, stealing a shopping cart is punishable by up to 60 days in
jail and a $500 fine. But police rarely catch anyone in the act.

So local governments across the state are tackling the battle in
other ways, typically requiring stores to keep carts in the parking lot
or pay a fine.

Hallandale Beach recently updated its laws requiring stores to
create plans for keeping carts on their property. Stores bigger than
35,000 square feet, about the size of many grocery stores, can be
required to install theft-prevention devices....Installation costs $20,000 to $30,000, Miller said....

But retailers are fighting back. The way they see it, the rules are
blaming the victim -- punishing stores for other people's stealing.

Thanks to Bob Houk for the link. 

I have written several times on prosecutorial abuse, most recently in this post on the Justice Department's current practice of forcing companies to waive attorney-client privilege and punishing companies that help their employees seek legal council.

The WSJ($) editorializes about a recent division by Judge Lewis Kaplan in the KPMG trial.

Those steps were extraordinary in their attempt to
pressure corporate executives: They include waiving attorney-client
privilege to give investigators access to internal documents and
cutting off accused employees from legal and other forms of support. In
short, the Thompson memo said that companies under investigation are
expected to surrender any right against self-incrimination and cut
their accused employees adrift.

In one sense, the memo's guidelines are just that --
internal guidelines for prosecutors. But as a practical matter, only a
rare CEO will risk the death sentence that a corporate indictment
represents. So "cooperation" as defined by Justice is hardly optional.
It was on this point that Judge Kaplan took Assistant U.S. Attorney
Justin Weddle to task last week. When Judge Kaplan questioned the
fairness of pressuring companies to throw their employees overboard,
Mr. Weddle replied that companies are "free to say, 'We're not going to
cooperate.'"

"That's lame," the judge retorted. He then asked Mr.
Weddle "what legitimate purpose" was served by insisting that companies
cut their former employees off from legal support. Companies under
investigation, Judge Kaplan noted, ought to be free to decide whether
to support their employees or former employees without Justice's "thumb
on the scale."

Mr. Weddle replied that paying the legal fees of
former employees charged with crimes amounted to protecting
"wrongdoers." This prompted the judge to remind the young prosecutor
that the accused are still innocent until proven guilty. He also
reminded Mr. Weddle that the Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantees
the right to counsel. And for good measure, if the government is
confident in its case, it shouldn't be afraid to allow "wrongdoers"
access to an adequate defense.

Its good to see these practices starting to get some judicial scrutiny.  There is unfortunately no real political constituency in this country to get worked up about this kind of stuff.  Left-leaning groups tend to be the first to challenge police and prosecutorial abuses of power, but have little interest in doing so when the target (ie corporations) is someone they have no ideological sympathy for.  And right-leaning groups tend to be strong law-and-order types that feel the need to go out of their way to be tough on recent corporate transgressors to avoid the accusation that they are in bed politically with white collar criminals.

I have never been one to wade much into the whole "media bias" issue.  Whenever I have discussed it, my main point of view is that journalists of whatever political stripe tend to suspend necessary skepticism when writing about an issue they are really passionate about.  That is why advocacy journalism can yield such crap.  I have never once dug into a strong advocacy journalism piece and not found any number of "facts" to be without attribution and often to not even make any sense.

Most people have now heard the origins of the now-famous "million homeless families" non-statistic, which was reprinted over and over but has been admitted to have been just made up by a leading homeless advocate.  And lets not forget Mary Mapes, who proudly describes herself as an advocacy journalist, and her now famous use of forgeries in her Bush-National Guard reports, leading to the classic "Fake but Accurate" meme.  People who believe in a cause, whether it be homelessness or GWB's fundamental corruption, suspend skepticism for "facts" and "statistics" that fit their point of view on the subject.  Usually they will shrug off challenges to the fact, saying "well, it may not be exactly X but we know the problem is a really big number."  In other words, fake but accurate.

Angela Valdez has a nice analysis of one such advocacy journalism effort, in this case the Oregonian's over-one-hundred part series on the "meth epidemic".  For example, she writes:

On Feb. 20 of this year, columnist S. Renee Mitchell wrote, without
offering data to back up her claim: "The number of meth addicts"”and the
crimes they commit to support their habits"”is exploding."....

In fact, meth use during the past four years has either declined or
stayed flat, according to two major national drug-use studies. The
National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that meth use did not
increase at all from 2002 (two years before The Oregonian
started its carpet-bombing coverage) through 2004, the last year for
which there is data. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future
Study, which examines drug use among youth, actually shows a decline in meth use among high-school students from 1999 to 2005....

Despite The Oregonian's reliance on this figure, there is no good evidence that meth causes 85 percent of the property crimes in Oregon.

Portland State University criminology professor Kris Henning
says the number just doesn't make sense. Department chair Annette Jolin
says the unsupportable statistic has become "something of a joke"among
statistical researchers in the department.

For one thing, Oregon property crimes are much lower than they
were 10 or even 20 years ago, the time period of the supposed meth
"epidemic."

"If meth causes property offenses, and meth use has gone up,"
Henning says, "then property offenses should have gone up. And they
haven't. It's either that, or all the people who commit property crimes
have disappeared and been replaced by a small number of meth users."

I looked at the silliness of meth hysteria statistics here.  But my point is that this is not a meth issue - this is an advocacy journalism issue.  You could write the same article challenging any number of articles in the paper every day.

PS-  But on the subject of meth, I will make one prediction:  I predict that the meth hysteria will do more to create legislation and police practices that will undermine civil liberties than did 9/11.  In fact, much of the Patriot Act is already used more to fight the drug war than to fight terrorism.

Per the BBC News:

More than 160 people were arrested after clashes erupted
in eastern Paris following a day of largely peaceful demonstrations
across France.

Vehicles were set on fire and stores were damaged as masked youths clashed with police.

Twenty-four people, including seven police officers, were injured in the violence, which lasted about six hours.

So what is the provocation?  Are youth being drafted to go to war?  Are fundamental civil rights being taken away?  No, the reason for millions of people on the street and outbreaks of violence is...

Protesters are bitterly opposed to the new law, which
allows employers to end job contracts for under-26s at any time during
a two-year trial period without having to offer an explanation or give
prior warning.

The government says it will encourage employers to hire
young people but students fear it will erode job stability in a country
where more than 20% of 18 to 25-year-olds are unemployed - more than
twice the national average.

 Oh my god, its, its....at-will employment.  Head to the barricades!

In reality, what has happened is that Europe has invented a new type of indentured servitude that works in reverse.  If you remember you history, poor Europeans bought their passage to America in the 16th and 17th century by essentially enslaving themselves for a fixed but finite (as opposed to African slavery) period of time.  They got to come to America, but were forced to work for the same employer without the ability to quit for seven years.

The French have taken this same concept, and flipped it on its head.  If an employer hires someone, the employer is prevented by law from ever firing that person.  In effect, an employer enslaves himself to every employee he hires.  Which might just explain why unemployment is so high over there.  I call it indentured employertude. 

These recent riots also turn history on its head.  In the past, many countries with legalized slavery have faced devastating slave riots and uprisings.  In this case, though, it is not the slaves (employers) doing the rioting to be freed, it is the slave holders (ie the employees) rioting to keep the employers captive.

Is France a total loss?

I guess I avoided it when I was growing up in Houston, but there sure seems to be something in the water down there as first our Houston-raised president, and now Houston's police chief, seem awfully fond of surveillance.  From Tom Kirkendall:

Anne Linehan and Charles Kuffner are two of Houston's best bloggers on local political matters, and they have been covering an emerging story that amazingly appears to be flying below the radar screen of most Houstonians -- i.e., Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt's
plan announced last week proposing to place surveillance cameras in
apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes to fight crime during a shortage of police officers.

Building permits should require malls and large apartment
complexes to install surveillance cameras, Hurtt said. And if a
homeowner requires repeated police response, it is reasonable to
require camera surveillance of the property, he said.

And the Chief's justification for surveillance cameras in private homes?:

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother,
but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why
should you worry about it?"

H'mm. That is not the kind of reasoning that one would find in, say, The Federalist Papers, now is it?

As I suspected in this post last week, it is increasingly clear that Wayne Gretzky's name was leaked by the NJ Police and/or prosecutors in order to raise the profile of their investigation, and therefore their work.  For those not following the case, initially they accused one or more B-list hockey players of running an illegal bookmaking business.  When that failed to get their investigation on the front page, they leaked the fact that they had tapes of Wayne Gretzky proving he knew about the alleged illegal activity. 

Well, that helped them achieve their goal.  They got their investigation on the front page everywhere, and set up a feeding frenzy as the media tried to climb all over each other to throw mud at one of the heretofore last unsullied great names in sports.  Now, as I suspected, we find out that they really had nothing on Wayne, and misrepresented what they had to get themselves headlines:

One of Canada's all-time great
heroes may get the change to keep that title, after a long week in an
ugly spotlight. The heat's being taken off Wayne Gretzky.

Gretzky was
beaten down by the media spotlight since early February, when his wife
and assistant coach were implicated in an alleged illegal gambling
ring. Gretzky was pulled into the fray a couple of days later, when
sources suggested he was in the loop on the whole thing. But there's
new information on a wiretap conversation between Wayne Gretzky and
Rich Tocchet, which seems to support Gretzky's contention that he had
no prior knowledge of an illegal gambling ring allegedly involving
Tocchet.

It turns out the conversation on how Gretzky's wife
could avoid being named as a participant was recorded last Monday, the
day after Janet Jones allegedly won money betting on the Super Bowl.
Also, Gretzky's wife Jane was alleged to have laid a half million
dollars in bets -- but that also appears to have been false
information. It's believed she only bet about a fifth of that.

OMG, I guess they told the truth -- they did have tapes that showed Wayne Gretzky knew about the abuses.  Of course, what they did not say last week was that the tapes were made AFTER the whole mess became public.  OK, I confess, I too knew about the bettin scandal after it became public.  There goes my reputation.

Unfortunately, our country is increasingly being operated as if we have a inalienable right to be titillated that trumps stuff like, oh, due process.  I made a similar observation in response to leaks of grand jury testimony on steroids.  I also recently posted on prosecutorial abuses in the Enron trials.

Update:  Apparently, NJ prosecutors are now saying that the bets Janet Gretsky allegedly made are not even illegal in the state of NJ.  So they leaked damaging information about both the Gretsky's "involvement", then 2 weeks later let the other shoe drop and made it clear they really didn't do anything illegal.  It couldn't be clearer that the police and prosecutors released the Gretsky's names to the press to grab the front-line headlines they were not getting with their B-list targets.

As the Enron trial lumbers towards the end of its second week, Tom Kirkendall continues to have good analysis (keep scrolling).  While the Enron bankruptcy has spawned a number of books, it is likely that the Enron prosecution may spawn a few of its own.  Already, the prosecution has botched trials thought to be lay-ups and has demonstrated a new level of presecutorial abuse.  I know that most people have little sympathy for the defendants, but one has to be concerned with the tactics being used in these cases.  From reading his posts, while its early in the game, the defense may be ahead on points, as the prosecution made another tactical error in leading with and spending far too long with a weak witness, indicating that they are ready to commit on the same mistakes they made in the failed broadband trial.

By the way, this snippet is very funny - the indictment against Skilling and Lay is apparently so unclear and confusing and poorly written that the prosecution, who wrote it, is asking that the judge not allow it to be mentioned or quoted in the trial.  LOL - they are asking that no one mention the charges against the defendants in front of the jury.  Which is actually pretty appropriate, since in effect the prosecution is going to try to get Skilling and Lay convicted of being rich and unlikable rather than convicted of any specific charges.

By the way, we in Phoenix have been watching the revelations about gambling surrounding our Coyotes coaching staff.  The leaks by the police of as-yet unproven charges against prominent people is yet another abuse that happens all-too-often.  Beyond my own questions as to why gambling of this sort is even illegal in this day and age, it is crystal clear to me that the NJ police are going out of their way to leak insinuations of Gretsky involvement, which I don't think they can prove, merely to get press and attention for themselves.