Let’s get one thing straight, right from the outset. Religion is not intrinsically a bad thing. It can be a powerful force for good, provided it’s done right. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Micah gives it to us straight. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require…
In the cut and thrust of criminal defense law, there are few more skilled than Mike Edleson. He is, frankly, legendary, and deserves to be. Mike struts. He glowers. He paces, he menaces, he terrifies. In the courtroom he is some kind of dark deity in a thundercloud. He is a force of nature. He…
Laurence Peter was a Canadian educator and hierarchiologist (whatever that may be), famous for the Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence… [I]n time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties… Work is accomplished by those employees…
With Christmas Day just a week out, you’ve likely got all or most of your shopping and wrapping done. I’m intensely proud to say that I’ve been mostly done for a month or more. It wasn’t always this way. I used to be the guy who was literally still trying to buy stuff late on…
There’s a legend in our family of a certain Grampa who was famous for “accidentally” knocking over the crokinole board when things started to go bad. You could see the twinkle in his eye and a tiny smile he couldn’t hide, and you knew it was only a matter of seconds before his knee would…
Somewhere in one of my undergrad history classes, the notion of the pendulum of history was discussed. The concept has stuck, and become part of my analysis of life and the world. As you know, the pendulum’s path is governed by three forces: gravity, momentum, and friction. There’s actually a fourth force -the rotation of…
As a lawyer, it pains me to mention such names as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman, the “lawyers” who propped up and promoted Donald Trump’s whacky stolen election theories. That one of them had been a famous mayor of New York and another was a well-regarded law teacher makes the pain more intense….
Amongst language snobs, “youse” is considered substandard and hickish. Maybe it’s time for reconsideration. Like “y’all” in Southern parlance, or “vous autres” in French, “youse” is a nice, cozy, all-inclusive, gender-neutral term to speak to a generic group of “others”. It already exists – why not legitimize it? Bad language? Only if we say so….
Lot, as you will recall, was the nephew of the patriarch Abraham. We don’t know much about him, except for a few sketchy stories which would get the Bible banned in Republican school libraries. If it weren’t the Bible. In any event, Lot decided to move to the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the…