The latest outrageous booting from school comes in Arizona, where Daniel McClaine, Jr. was suspended for having a photo of an AK-47 as a laptop background.

Law prof Jonathan Turley writes:

A teacher noticed the picture on his school-issued computer. It shows an AK-47 on top of a flag. He was immediately suspended for three days under a policy that prohibits “sending or displaying offensive messages or pictures” and prohibits access, sending, creating or forwarding pictures that are considered “harassing, threatening, or illegal.”

The problem is that many people do not consider a picture of a gun to be threatening or harassing. It happens to be an object that the Supreme Court in Heller said was protected as an individual right under the Second Amendment. Of course, it could be argued, pornography is protected under the first amendment but restricted in terms of persons and places where it can be seen. Yet, the image of a gun alone is not viewed by many Americans as threatening as opposed to protective or patriotic. The school’s position appears to be that any picture of a gun is inherently an image of violence. There are a variety of images that may be read differently by students from pictures of Obama to protest pictures of torture or pictures of whaling. Likewise, there are pictures like the Iwo Jima memorial or revolutionary images that involve guns. The question is whether such a policy is intentionally vague to allow arbitrary or absolute regulation of this form of speech.

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I live in California and frequently work on the East Coast. That means I either fly from 3 pm (pacific) to 10 or 11 pm (eastern) or take a red eye flight. The usual “C” shaped pillows sold in airports don’t do anything for me. I use a regular foam/velcro neck brace which costs $10-15. The term of art is “cervical collar” – foam with a velcro closure. Carried by some drug stores or easily available from that giant mail order site that begins with “A” and sounds like a river. It’s what you use for a “sprained neck” but keep your head up for sleeping on night flights. It’s a fraction of the cost of any specialized doo-dad (as reviewed here) and works just great for me. Embarassment factor – well, the lights are off and I’m asleep. Don’t forget to add foam ear plugs and an eye mask.

From The New York Times, in an article about gifts for the frugal traveler, Seth Kugel writes:

When I wrote in September about the science of sleeping in planes — and in particular, how hard it was to sleep sitting up because your brain can’t fully rest when it’s charged with keeping your head from flopping over — several readers suggested a foam cervical collar, the kind you see on people with whiplash. I tried out the one pictured, not on a plane but on a nonreclining chair in my apartment, and had a really great nap. Of course, there was no one climbing over me to go to the lavatory, but that’s another problem.

I love the goofy picture of the $12.99 collar they show at Amazon:

(They linked to the “firm” one, so that’s what I got, in small, for $10 plus, I think, $5 shipping.)

If you can afford it, I’d also add what Santa Gregg got me — the gift of silence: Bose QC15 asshole-cancelling headphones (or, as they’re sold, “noise-cancelling”). They block out a huge amount of noise, especially the low bass and wearing them means I can sleep when I need to, no matter who’s doing laundry or tearing up the street with a jackhammer down the block. Of course, I figured out that I need to sleep with the c-shaped airplane pillow (the thick velour-covered kind from the airport, not the “memory foam” kind) on top of my pillow so I can lie on my side. (The donut hole fits the earpiece and the top part goes out the open neck part!)

UPDATE: A few years into being with Gregg, he showed me this pillow in the SkyMall catalogue — which I bought.

I reminded him of that this morning, and how he refused to sit next to me if I ever used it.

Gregg corrected me: “I didn’t refuse to sit with you; I refused to get on the plane with you.”

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The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

…It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

There was a photo of Obama apparently skeet shooting — a photo which the White House forbade messing with:

The photograph may not be manipulated in any way…

Predictably, for anyone who knows of The Streisand Effect, there probably has yet to be a photo of Obama that has been so messed with.

My personal favorite, from a Facebook friend’s feed:

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Christopher Elliott writes in a Nat Geo column about something I’ve written about before — that the way to find terrorists is through targeted intelligence by highly trained intelligence officers. In other words, putting resources and manpower toward people there’s reason to suspect are terrorists — and long before they hit any building or airport:

Critics say there’s no causal relationship between a TSA with a sprawling mandate and the absence of a terrorist attack. Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, says screeners are conducting the law-enforcement equivalent of a clumsy police dragnet. “They’re throwing something at the wall to see if it sticks.” He and others are troubled that the random roadside checkpoints and the intermittent security screenings at subway and train stations could become permanent. Groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center are taking a lead in advocating limits to what they view as an expansive TSA. The center is suing the federal government on the decision to deploy body scanners and to ensure the right of the public to have its views heard.

The consequences of going too far in either direction could be serious. We have to carefully balance security against privacy; otherwise we risk becoming a show-me-your-papers-please nation with troubling echoes of other closed societies. “Governments good and bad have always cited national security, the prevention of terrorism, and the defense of freedom as their excuses for surveillance and control of people’s movements,” says Edward Hasbrouck, a privacy advocate who is one of the leading voices against TSA overreach. “But we can’t defend freedom by adopting measures that prevent us from exercising the rights we profess to believe in.”

Has the TSA prevented one or more terrorist attacks? That’s unanswerable. But I think the price has been high. And I fear that the cost could rise, just to make us feel safe when we travel. We need to order up just enough security as is necessary–and no more.

Previous attempts to define and limit the TSA have failed, despite a blistering 2012 congressional report that recommended downsizing and privatizing parts of the TSA, and several bills designed to contain the agency’s reach. TSA reform didn’t register as an election-year concern, and neither candidate took a meaningful stance on the issue. Obviously, no political party wants to be the first to reexamine the security apparatus created more than a decade ago, and risk the political repercussions if there’s another 9/11-style attack.

Fellow travelers, let’s call for one sensible step: Revise the TSA’s mission statement to limit its activity to air transportation. After all, we have local and state police, highway patrols, Customs and Border Protection, and, if necessary, the National Guard to protect roads, bridges, railways, and the occasional Super Bowl game. Adding a single word–”air”–to its mission would end its controversial VIPR program. One word would put the TSA’s enormous budget into perspective, allowing lawmakers to ask–and answer–the question: How much do we want to spend on aviation security? I’m willing to bet it would be significantly less than the $7.4 billion Americans currently pay for the TSA.

Related: Burgess Everett writes at Politico that Rand Paul is planning to refile legislation to scale back the TSA:

The Kentucky Republican said in an interview that he plans to refile legislation that would drastically scale back the Transportation Security Administration’s reach by privatizing security screening operations at airports and creating a series of passenger protections.

…One bill would have ended the TSA screening operation and required airports to select companies from the private sector to do screening — a growing practice already used at a handful of airports, though one dealt a blow after Sacramento’s airport recently reversed its steps toward privatization. The other bill would have allowed some people to opt out of pat-downs, required distribution of a list of fliers’ rights and vastly expanded an expedited screening program for frequent fliers, a movement also embraced by new House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas).

Let’s explore this again: We’re really going to stop a terrorist plot by having unskilled workers grope their genitals minutes before they board a plane? It is extremely dangerous to give up our constitutional rights — and it is even more tragic that we are doing so in exchange for the security equivalent of a puppet show.

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And the most important detail: I now make about the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted (even in fine restaurants in Paris, New York, and LA) — and with speed and ease.

The Aeropress looks like a junior high science project, and I love that about it, too.

The AeroPress getting started directions are not the greatest. (I couldn’t figure out how to get the two tubes apart — you unscrew counterclockwise, which wasn’t in directions). But after you get the two tubes apart, you just unscrew the cap on the bottom of one of the cylinders (the black cap with the little holes), slip a little paper filter in there (they come with), and make your coffee as directed.

I put in two scoops of coffee (fine-ground), put water up to three mark on the cylinder, and then come out with a double espresso. I fill the 3/4 of the rest (of my big 16-oz cup) with water, and it’s still very strong coffee (and I like mine break-a-tooth black). I froth a little over a quarter cup of milk and then pour it into the top. (Detailed directions on how to use the AeroPress at the Amazon link.)

Oh, and actually, still coming out around $100, I have the $30 Aroma electric kettle, which Gregg also got me (nice boyfriend!), which heats the water fast, and apparently, to a nice temperature to make great coffee in the AeroPress. Not being cheffy, I have no thermometers around, save for one for sick people that doesn’t go up all that far, temperaturewise (and I’d hate to think of someone with a 150-degree temperature). (Also, it’s best that there’s no possibility that anyone’s stuck your coffee thermometer in their butt.)

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From the news story with the video:

To qualify for placards, drivers must have a medical professional certify they have substantial impaired mobility, lung or cardiovascular disease or severe vision problems, according to the DMV.

A hidden camera caught one woman place her placard in the rear view mirror of her Range Rover before taking a spin class – several days in a row.

According to DMV records, the woman has been disabled for over a decade.

“You’ve had the placard since 1999. Do you have a disability or are you just using it to park for free?” Goldstein asked.

“I obviously have a disability,” the woman said.

When asked to explain her disability, the woman responded, “There’s laws regarding privacy matters.”

An internationally-renowned fitness expert, Karen Voight, was also spotted using a disabled placard. She teaches a stretching class at the health club.

“You have a disability?” Goldstein asked.

“Well, my knee is unable to do a lot of things, and I was told by the doctor to be off of it as often as I can,” Voight responded.

“Even though you’re teaching a class here twice a week?” Goldstein said.

“But I don’t. What I teach is a rehab class,” she said.

The health club simply labels the class as “stretching.

Young kids were also seen weight-lifting and playing basketball — their car uses a placard linked to a 77-year-old man.

What this means for truly disabled people — the sort who roll out of wheelchair vans instead of skipping out of cute convertibles — is that they sometimes can’t find a space because of all the bullshit disabled taking them.

Or, as the woman in the wheelchair in the piece points out, a person like her with real disability may be put through danger and hardship by needing to park far away.

It’s reprehensible and I hope the people who have these tags because they got the right doctor to wink-wink that they needed them know deep down what scummy people they are and hate themselves for it.

Oh, and as the report points out, disabled status, once granted, doesn’t expire. The placards are automatically renewed, year after year after year.

And finally, as a commenter — “Mr Law Abider” — noted at the CBS site:

The real question is why people with the placards need to park at meters for free? What part of their disability requires free parking? What, they can’t reach up to put money in the meter? I thought the idea behind the placards was to give people with a disability a parking spot closer to a building….and those with vans, enough room to get a wheel chair in and out. But why free parking? Do away with that and I think a majority of your problems will go away.

Which brings us back to fitness trainer Karen Voigt (Ohhhh, her knees. She can teach stretching, but can’t wallllk…oh, it’s so hard). The truth is, there’s a garage where just about every spot is close to the elevator at that chi-chi gym, Sports Club LA.

I do not work out at a gym or that gym, but David Rensin, my friend and literary conscience, takes me to lunch there about once every six months.

The thing is, you have to PAY to park at that gym’s garage, and people with handicapped placards get to park free at meters.

I emailed Karen Voight: karen@karenvoight.com:

Subj: being cheap is not a true disability – saving parking $ at Sports Club LA’s garage

My friend takes me to Sports Club LA for lunch every six months.

The truth is, no space in that garage is far from the elevator.

In fact, it looks like you walked further than you would have if you’d parked at ANY space in the garage to get to your meter.

Hmmm…could it be that you get to park at meters for free, and it costs MONEY to park in that garage?

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@HideousTerrier
I’m not licking you because I love you. I am licking you to decide whether you taste good enough to feed upon after you die in bed.

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For a muscular agency that combats vicious drug criminals, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration acts like a terrified and obstinate toddler when it comes to basic science. For years, the DEA and the National Institute for Drug Abuse have made it all but impossible to develop a robust body of research on the medical uses of marijuana.

A pro-marijuana group lost its legal battle this week when a federal appellate court ruled that marijuana would remain a Schedule I drug, defined as having no accepted medical value and a high potential for abuse. The court deferred to the judgment of federal authorities, quoting the DEA’s statement that “the effectiveness of a drug must be established in well-controlled, well-designed, well-conducted and well-documented scientific studies…. To date, such studies have not been performed.”

But guess who bears responsibility for this level of ignorance? The DEA itself, which through its ultra-tight restrictions on marijuana has made it nearly impossible for researchers to obtain the drug for study, and the National Institute for Drug Abuse, which controls the availability of the tiny quantity of research-grade marijuana that is federally approved for production.

The few, smaller studies conducted so far suggest marijuana has promise as a medicine, but they’re far from conclusive. The National Cancer Institute and the Institute of Medicine support further research.

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I have spent most of my son’s nearly four years on the planet scouring thrift stores and online shops for fun, colorful, and bright clothing. It’s been easy to meander back and forth between boy’s and girl’s departments as, for the most part, a lot of the clothes could work on a boy or girl.

Granted, my son has worn his fair share of puff sleeves and rainbows, but MOST of his clothing has been boy-leaning, with a dash of glitter on a sleeve.

…My desire to dress my son in bright colors that could work for a boy or girl is half a political stance and half a frustration with how despondently boring I find most boy’s clothing.

Truly horrifying is the pink sweatshirt with big hearts all over it (in a photo at the link) that she thought would be a great political experiment for her son to wear.

The kid is now apparently trying to wear little boy clothes:

Right now, my kid is wearing an Angry Birds pajama shirt and owl-covered tights under plaid pants, and that outfit is awesome. It’s colorful and fun, but it’s also a little more boy-friendly than clothing he’s donned in the past.

I suppose this is all part of realizing my kid is getting older, but there’s a real part of me that mourns the loss of freedom in clothing, however temporary it may be.

Whose “freedom” would that be?

Notice the absence of any mention of Daddy?

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Ken Stone writes at La Mesa Patch about a mom’s $5 million lawsuit targeting “toxic” frozen pizzas sold locally:

Katie Simpson bought frozen pizzas about five times in the past year, including a California Pizza Kitchen Personal Pizza Barbeque Chicken and the same maker’s Crispy Thin Crust Pizza Signature Pepperoni.

But when she learned they contained trans fat–an ingredient linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer–she felt as if she were sold poison.

That’s the argument being made in a $5 million federal class-action lawsuit that claims Nestle–makers of DiGiorno, Stouffer’s and California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizzas –is “placing profits over public health” by failing to remove trans fat.

When she LEARNED they contained trans fat? I mean, was this a closely guarded secret? Or, wait…

The article reads:

The suit targets partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, or PHVO, which it says is the main source of trans fat in the American diet and “used in dangerous quantities in the Nestle Trans Fat Pizzas.”

“Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” is a thing you see on the ingredients lists of products.

Might this have been — dare I say it? — on the INGREDIENTS LIST printed on the package?

My mom decided that all sorts of things other people ate were unhealthy. So, she did this amazing thing — read the ingredients list on products and bought a lot of the foods we ate at the health food store.

Yes, personal responsibility. That’s what people use to have before they just closed their eyes, bought a product and then sued the fuck out of the company that produced it.

Oh, and hilariously, Katie Simpson apparently has no problem feeding her kids the flour that causes their blood sugar to rise and that cardiologist William Davis, in Wheat Belly, shows leads to numerous health detriments.

Or, wait — will she next be suing the “amber waves of grain”?

RELATED: The health benefits of lard, by Dr. Mary Dan Eades.

@overlawyered

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I almost quit school, but realized people have a prejudice against people who don’t graduate, so I finished at NYU — did one year there — and wrote my way to a scholarship to pay for some of it, and worked nights and weekends to pay my living expenses in New York.

Had my parents not paid, I might have done what I advise kids who come from poor families to do (when I talk at a school) — go to a good community college like Santa Monica college for two years, gotten great grades (which I always have, or at least good grades, because I’m a nerd) and then transferred to a better, four-year school.

Brooks writes in The New York Times of his more radical and more creative solution for keeping college costs down:

Fortunately, there was a solution — an institution called Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J. This is a virtual college with no residence requirements. It banks credits acquired through inexpensive correspondence courses from any accredited college or university in America.

I took classes by mail from the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, and other schools with the lowest-priced correspondence courses I could find. My degree required the same number of credits and type of classes that any student at a traditional university would take. I took the same exams (proctored at local libraries and graded by graduate students) as in-person students. But I never met a teacher, never sat in a classroom, and to this day have never laid eyes on my beloved alma mater.

And the whole degree, including the third-hand books and a sticker for the car, cost me about $10,000 in today’s dollars.

Now living back in the United States, I followed the 10K-B.A. with a 5K-M.A. at a local university while working full time, and then endured the standard penury of being a full-time doctoral fellow in a residential Ph.D. program. The final tally for a guy in his 30s supporting a family: three degrees, zero debt.

Did I earn a worthless degree? Hardly. My undergraduate years may have been bereft of frissons, but I wound up with a career as a tenured professor at Syracuse University, a traditional university. I am now the president of a Washington research organization.

Not surprisingly, my college experience has occasionally been the target of ridicule. It is true that I am no Harvard Man. But I can say with full confidence that my 10K-B.A. is what made higher education possible for me, and it changed the course of my life. More people should have this opportunity, in a society that is suffering from falling economic and social mobility.

The 10K-B.A. is exactly the kind of innovation we would expect in an industry that is showing every indication of a bubble that is about to burst, as Thomas K. Lindsay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation shows in a new report titled, “Anatomy of a Revolution? The Rise of the $10,000 Bachelor’s Degree.” When tuition skyrockets and returns on education stagnate, we can expect a flight to value, especially by people who can least afford to ride the bubble, and who have no choice but to make a cost-effective college investment.

In the end, however, the case for the 10K-B.A. is primarily moral, not financial. The entrepreneurs who see a way for millions to go to college affordably are the ones who understand the American dream. That dream is the opportunity to build a life through earned success. That starts with education.

Of course, what makes college much more expensive now is the college loan craziness. The more government is willing to shell out in wild loans, the more wildly colleges jack up their prices — and the salaries of their administrators. Who isn’t getting the bucks? A good many of the teachers.

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Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation reveal more people were arrested for marijuana possession than all violent crimes combined in 2011.

More:

Since 1998, individuals arrested for drug crimes have constituted the largest portion of federal prison admissions, followed closely by those arrested for immigration and weapons-related offenses. Meanwhile, the CRS reports there has been a significant drop off in the number of inmates entering prison for violent or property-related crimes, which only made up about 4 percent and 11 percent of prison admissions in 2010.

A huge portion of those drug offenders are arrested for marijuana offenses, even though the substance – now legal in 18 states for medicinal use- has become increasingly mainstream.

So, instead of your tax dollars going to fund stopping muggers, murderers, rapists, they’re prosecuting and jailing potheads.

Oh, and by the way, also from the piece:

Federal prisoners do not have the ability to receive parole, when correctional authorities release low-risk inmates into community supervision for the remainder of their sentences.

Inmates sentenced after November 1, 1987 are no longer eligible for parole, meaning every offender sentenced since then must serve the entirety of his or her sentence. As a result, there have not been enough prisoners released to make way for new inmates as federal sentencing rates ballooned in the 1990s and early 2000s.

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Jeff and Jennifer Counceller … rescued an injured fawn and nursed it back to health at their Connersville, Ind., home. The couple now faces the possibility of jail time and fines after state officials charged them with a misdemeanor for harboring the animal.

Jeff Counceller, a police officer in Connersville, and his wife were charged with unlawful possession of a deer, a misdemeanor that punished to its fullest extent could put the Councellers in jail for up to 60 days and cost them up to $2,000 in fines.

The couple rescued the deer more than two years ago after finding it on their neighbor’s porch. The Councellers said the deer had sustained injuries, and they wanted to nurse it back to health.

“I could feel all of the open wounds all along her back side and she wouldn’t stand up,” Jennifer Counceller told ABC News.

They brought the deer home and named her Little Orphan Dani.

…On the day Dani was to be put down, the Councellers said she inexplicably escaped from their backyard. Even though Dani disappeared back into the wild, the Councellers’ legal problems didn’t go with the fawn.

The Indiana Department of Natural Resources said it couldn’t comment on pending litigation but that it did discourage people from taking in injured wildlife. This case could go to court next month, and if charges aren’t dropped, it will be left for a jury to decide whether the Councellers broke the law.

Big government scores again!

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Is your workplace getting shot up by a crazed gunman?

No problem — just grab a pair of scissors and fight back!

That’s some of the helpful advice in a new instructional video from the Department of Homeland Security that was posted on the agency’s Web site just a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“If you are caught out in the open and cannot conceal yourself or take cover, you might consider trying to overpower the shooter with whatever means are available,” says the narrator in the video, which shows an office worker pulling scissors out of a desk drawer.

That video:

Yes, your tax dollars paid for this crap. More from the article:

Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, said he has a better option for consideration than a pair of scissors when confronting an armed mass murderer — a legal firearm.

“That’s why I prefer a gun, and I usually do carry a gun when it is lawful to do so,” said Feldman.

More from the article:

The video is part of the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to reduce firearm violence in the wake of the horrific mass murder last month of 20 children and six teachers in Newtown, Conn., said a Homeland Security official.

I would say it’s part of the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to separate citizens and their firearms.

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Now the NYPD has asked us to accept body scanners on the streets, allowing them to peer under your clothes for “anything dangerous” — guns, bombs, the Constitution — from up to 25 yards away for, you know, our safety. (And someone please think of the children!)

I’m pleased to have filed the first lawsuit against the nude body scanners after the TSA deployed them as primary screening in 2010, and I’m pleased to announce that today I filed suit against New York City for its testing and planned (or current?) deployment of terahertz imaging devices to be used on the general public from NYPD vans parked on the streets — a “virtual stop-and-frisk.” My civil complaint, Corbett v. City of New York, 13-CV-602, comes attached with a motion for a preliminary injunction that would prohibit use of the device on random people on their way to school, work, the theater, or the bar.

It is unfortunate that it seems that government at all levels is always in need of a fresh reminder that the citizens for whom it exists demand privacy, and that each technological advance is not a new tool to violate our privacy. However, as often as proves to be necessary, we will give them that reminder.

Every time we give up another right, we prime the way for ourselves to give up more. Don’t wait until we become a police state to do your part in speaking up. (And saying that a few years ago sounded like crazy hyperbole — all that “become a police state.” Sounds less so now, with the NYPD giving the finger to the notion of search of everyone without probable cause, huh?)

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