Dave Ferguson

For clarity: I wasn’t being sarcastic about “serious lawyer.”

I’m just saying that many serious opinions sound good until they meet a circuit court opinion.

In all seriousness, don't OLC's statements boil down to "as your serious lawyer, we think this is legal [or not, as the case might be]" in the same way that "executive order" means "memo to the executive branch" and not "Nobel Prize in Unitary Executiveness?"

More and more I think having a net worth of a billion or more, either personally or through a Trumpian Jenga-tower of LLCs, offshore accounts, and other sanctimonious flimflam, should be a felony.

If not, then a disease requiring mandatory quarantine until the symptoms disappear.

You can see this in their disdain for (or ignorance of) any specialized knowledge and skill that implies (a) they don't understand something or (b) they can't do something.

Years later, I read a book about complex learning. Hard going but connected with my field--and, I realized, with the Sociologist Vote question.

A post from a series I wrote; this one is related to how you learn what the authors call "non-recurrent" tasks.

www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2120

And that reconstruction, testing, domain mapping, etc., is the only way you actually do learn theory, as opposed to memorizing bullet points...

...My career has been in corporate training and development. Like a lot of complex topics, the presidential vote one is an example of a question to which there's no single right answer. So it's a way for the individual to try and reconstruct the theory (e. g., of auto engines, of Marx's argument)...

"Give a choice for each. Explain your reasons based on your reading and the class discussion."

I had so much fun working on that.

...Karl Marx voted for Nixon, figuring that would hasten the overthrow of capitalism. ;-)

One of the "caring about learning" aspects was a midterm take home exam in I think 1968. The gist:

It's election eve. Eight sociologists (the people we studied in 'Modern Sociological Thought') are lying awake, trying to decide who to vote for U.S. president...

As an undergrad, I took a sociology course that was over my head (no real idea what sociology was about). The professor was terrific: encouraging, good humored, serious about her field. I ended up accidentally majoring (not a chosen major; I just kept taking classes...

I swiped a laminated cardboard sign off a dashboard in the admin building parking lot at my undergrad school. Taped it up in my car:

UNIVERSITY OF DETROIT

PRESIDENT'S CAR

It was not an impressive sign.

Cheese and crackers -- a 19-year-old blog post!

(I thought you might enjoy details of Muir's book.)

Proceeding with John Muir | Dave's Whiteboard share.google/3xsxARWJTbjF...

I’m no handyman but I used about $75 worth of Craftsman stuff to remove the engine from a 1966 Beetle…

After I bought (through the Whole Earth Catalog) John Muirs immortal “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.”

I still have a mental soft spot for Craftsman hand tool, though now they’re probably made by Etaoin Shrdlu in a country that’s not part of the international postal system.

@lizwozniak.bsky.social is this the Liz of the doughnuts?

And of old punk rock?

My wife is from Wisconsin.

There is only one SAWZALL.

When my son and his wife had a child, we found a sort-of plush pirate doll. (It had a knit or crocheted looking body.)

Pirate complete with eyepatch and a peg leg.

I bet you could.
I was thinking of those plump little plastic tools, but for babies, plush would be great.

I think my wife's brothers, all in the trades, were issued My First Dremel at birth.

Otherwise, I don't recall hearing "seraph" in sixteen years of Catholic school. And I think in the hymn it's singular-for-plural ("the cargo bike appears all over the city").

Hymnary.org: a comprehensive index of hymns and hymnals | Hymnary.org Hymnary.org: A comprehensive index of over 1 million hymn texts, hymn tunes, and hymnals, with information on authors and composers, lyrics and scores of many hymns, and various media files. Hymnary.org also incorporates the Dictionary of North American Hymnology, an extensive collection of hymnals published before 1978.

A vote for "seraph" being far less often:

I can recall *one* Christian use, but it's in a hymn that dates (according to this site) to the 1860s.

"...At His feet the six-winged seraph,
cherubim with sleepless eye..."

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence | Hymnary.org share.google/x4P9NTJQU6jp...

I remember my parents saying they got help from the March of Dimes: polio left my older brother with one leg shorter than the other, and one foot smaller, so all his life he needed two different shoe sizes.

Died a few years ago. He'd have been 78 this spring.

(Nods in Canadian)

How many days until Election Day in US? Count down every day to Election Day in US, with your own customizable countdown clock.

days.to/until/electi...

Has anyone checked Kash Patel's luggage?

That freeloading buffoon is far above checking anything than his number of followbots.

You don’t need health insurance if (a) you have perfect health and (b) you just *know* there’s a loophole to mortality.

Roger Taney 2.0 is looking a bit shopworn.

With any luck, Justice K-Stop has been bitching to him nonstop.

As Bob Dole said of why he ran for vice-president, it was inside work, and there was no heavy lifting.

The only kind of site that would truly delight the Great Helmsman would be pay per view.

Hank Ghant, a vice-president of UAW Local 212, sang “Joe Hill” at the funeral of Walter Reuther.

It was carried live on all three Detroit TV network stations, and on CKLW-TV from Windsor as well.