Month: September 2024

We all know about judge shopping, right? It's the practice of filing lawsuits in districts with only one or two judges, which guarantees you a friendly face if you pick the right district. It's most prevalent in north Texas, which has several districts that are helmed solely by business-friendly, anti-government, right-wing judges, usually chosen by Donald Trump.

This crossed my eyeballs today via a post by Stephen Vladeck responding to a recent defense of judge shopping by Reed O'Connor of.......the northern district of Texas. So I read through O'Connor's defense, and it turned out to consist of only two things:

1. Judge shopping is even worse in patent and bankruptcy courts, so why are you picking on us?
2. Allowing judge shopping means that "heavier access-to-justice burdens aren't imposed on citizens in our district based solely on where they live."

The first one is plain dumb, and also wrong. Judge shopping in patent cases caused a huge fuss a few years ago and ended up being banned in its epicenter of Waco, Texas.

The second defense doesn't even parse. O'Connor hears most of his cases in Fort Worth but holds hearings in Wichita Falls if the litigant is local. There's no reason this couldn't continue for genuinely local cases even if most Wichita Falls filings were randomly assigned throughout the northern district (which is virtually all located in Dallas/Fort Worth).

Stephen Vladeck's response is generally polite because, you know, lawyers. But I don't have to be: This is the flimsiest, most ridiculous defense of judge shopping imaginable. Unless there's truly something I don't understand about how much travel judges would have to do under a new regime, I think we can safely say that there's no justification for Texas-style judge shopping. It's a purely partisan Republican thing.

This is the new Gerald Desmond bridge in Long Beach. It's not really that new anymore, but this is the first time I've captured it at sunset.

Two things of note. First, the view is better now that they've demolished the old Gerald Desmond bridge. Second, there were a whole bunch of electrical wires spanning the entire image horizontally, but Photoshop's AI-powered generative fill eliminated them. I'm still sort of awestruck by this even though the effect isn't perfect.

The bottom photo is the uncropped original for comparison.

The Wall Street Journal reports today about a massive Chinese cyberattack on US broadband suppliers:

The hacking campaign, called Salt Typhoon...is the latest in a series of incursions that U.S. investigators have linked to China in recent years.

....Last week, U.S. officials said they had disrupted...a China-based hacking group called Flax Typhoon. And in January, federal officials disrupted Volt Typhoon, yet another China-linked campaign that has sought to quietly infiltrate a swath of U.S. critical infrastructure.

OK, I get the "typhoon" part. Destructive storm, Asian origin, etc. But what's with salt, flax, and volt?

Finally the preliminary steel import numbers for August are here. They're down 2.4% from July. And whether you care or not, you are going to see who we get our steel from:

The New York Times has a lengthy report this morning about the monthlong campaign of destruction that Israel has imposed on the towns of Jenin and Tulkarm in the West Bank:

For months, Israeli raids destroyed roads and other infrastructure that local officials said they repeatedly fixed, only to see their work razed again in the next assault.

In Jenin, some 70 percent of roads have been damaged or destroyed by the recent raids, according to the mayor, Nidal Obeidi. Internet, electricity and phone lines were shut down in some areas. Sewage and water lines were also cut, leaving about 80 percent of Jenin without running water, local officials said, including the main hospital.

This is just a snippet, but it's an example of what I meant when I criticized Ta-Nehisi Coates a couple of days ago. This kind of stuff is reported all the time. Maybe not as much as it should be, but plenty nonetheless. So if you don't know about it, either you don't care about the whole subject or else you have remarkably narrow reading habits. It's not an example of the media betraying you, it's just a matter of personal incuriosity.

There's still no steel report, but we do have the latest estimate of home sales. It was down 2.4% in August:

This is within a hair's breadth of the lowest level in the past five years (November 2023) and well on its way to busting the record. But maybe the Fed's latest rate cut, which has already lowered mortgage rates, will turn that around?

I'm in the DOU, the Definitive Observation Unit, which means I'm being observed by a lot of nurses. However, since I'm untethered from all the usual machines that go beep there's nothing much to observe except for the blood pressure readings they take every four hours. And you know what? It's surprisingly pleasant to be in the hospital when you aren't sick and aren't hooked up constantly to a bunch of machines.

(I do have a heart monitor, but it's portable and I just stick it in my pocket.)

In any case, I got my first dose of chemo last night around 6 pm, which means I also got my first dose of dex at 6 pm. It takes about 10-12 hours to take effect, so I actually got a few hours of sleep before waking up at 5 am.

5 am! What am I supposed to do at 5 am? There's no news yet, and even the day's statistical releases are mostly still a few hours away. However, the Census Bureau is kind enough to release their summary of steel imports at 5:30 am (Pacific time), so perhaps you'd like to know a little bit about the current state of US steel imports?

No? Tough luck. Here it is:

UPDATE: Bastards. At the last second they moved the release time to 7 am. So I have nothing for you. I suspect dirty tricks from the Deep State.

Here's an estimate of US carbon emissions through 2023:

Are we meeting our goals? It doesn't look like it. If you take out the pandemic year of 2020, we've been consistently above target by about 10% since 2018.

More here in the Wall Street Journal.

I'm sitting in a hospital bed tonight after my first chemo injection and I have nothing to do. So let's play a game of AITA.

Before I checked in, I had already decided to make a nuisance of myself over two things. The first is that I wanted to wear my street clothes instead of the dumb hospital gown. To my surprise, that was no problem. They didn't care.

The second was bound to be more contentious: I also didn't want an IV line installed. They're magnets for infection—and a pain in the ass—and none of my meds were going to be administered via IV. Nor did my case require a constant saline drip.

Needless to say, the nurse objected. The nurse's boss objected. The doctor objected. Procedure demanded a peripheral IV line. Beyond that, their case was simple: I was here under observation because the chemo meds can have severe side effects. If that happened, they wanted the IV line ready to go. My case was also simple: If anything goes wrong, you can install an IV in two minutes, which is faster than you can get drugs from the pharmacy. There was no danger in waiting.

To my surprise (again) I also won this argument—with a stipulation that if there were any problems I wouldn't object to the IV line. Naturally I agreed with that.

All that said, I understand that maybe I was being an asshole.¹ What do you think? AITA?

¹Despite this, I'm the nurses' favorite! This is only partly due to my natural charm and mostly due to the fact that I'm alive and friendly while practically everyone else on my floor is old and all but comatose.

John Lanchester says today that the inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, "has for a century described economic reality, shaped political debate and determined the fate of presidents."

Amen to that. I wish we could staple the CPI to the forehead of every adult in America.