Author: Kim du Toit

By Lawyers, For Lawyers

Legal Stuff

I swear, there should be a warning in the masthead at Volokh Conspiracy which states:  “If you are not a lawyer, most of what follows will be incomprehensible.”

As is their latest post (via Insty, who is also a lawyer and therefore unaware of the consequences of links to this website). Will Chevron Get the Lemon Treatment?  talks about SCOTUS judgements called Lemon and Chevron  without any explanation (however brief [sic] ) of what those judgements were or what they mean to our society or polity.

Even a link to each would have sufficed, but no doubt m’learned friend was too busy to supply one.

Well, I did a quick search, so here’s the Lemon Test and here’s Chevron.

No need to thank me, it’s all part of the service.  Even knowing the facts, Adler’s post is just barely readable.  Fucking High Priests need a reality check.

Bullshit Spreaders

Eco-Crap, Media Assholes

In the headline to this post, I can make a wee suggestion for change:

NPR Spreads Misinformation About Climate Change and Models (Again)

Actually, you could put it as “NPR Spreads Misinformation About _________ (Again)” or even just  “NPR Spreads Misinformation (Again)” if you want to go for brevity.

However, let me not spoil your enjoyment of the article itself, which is brimful of all sorts of anti- Green / Net Zero / glueball wormening or whatever the Watermelons are calling it nowadays.  A taste:

Since climate is an average of weather in a region over the span of 30 years, right away attempting to attribute individual storms to climate change is unscientific at best. Attribution research has been widely criticized for its inability to be repeated through testing, falsified, or measured in the real world—all necessary characteristics of science—and for the fact that predictions made by the models are based on emission scenarios that don’t match real world emission data, and are, in some instances, impossible.

All that, and so much more.  Read it, and chuckle.

Then And Now

Old Fartism

Found these two pics in a newspaper somewhere:

Dallas, late 19th century:

The same block in Dallas, today:

With all the faults and problems associated with living in the 19th century, I still prefer the look of that time to the soulless concrete ghastliness of today.

But you all knew I would feel that way.

Fearful Insanity

Anti-Gun Nannies, The Gun Thing

Reader Simon M. sends me this story which is so… I can’t describe it, but here’s the opening:

A young lady in NYC decided to write a diary. Being a young lady what she wrote in her diary she considered to be private. It was her thoughts, her fears, her wants. It was for her.

Unfortunately, her brother was an uncultured clod and when he discovered her diary in a public area, knowing it was private, decided to read it. We can guess about how the brother handled such private disclosures.

The young lady realized that she needed some what to secure her diary from prying eyes. The idea of wrapping it in chains probably didn’t appeal to her. Like wise, it is unlikely she was able to get a high level wizard to spell lock it.

She found a small portable safe at a second hand store and bought it for cheap. She then proceeded to lock her personal items in the lock box to keep her private stuff private.

And then the S. Hit The F.

Read all about it*.

And to answer the author’s question:  no, there isn’t.

*To Reader Simon:  please resend the email, if you can.  She was broken.

Not According To Brother Jesse

Africa

I often use the “African-American” term to describe myself, almost always in fun, or else to poke holes in someone’s refusal to see my point.  Never have I tried to use the “African-American” claim for any other purpose, as David Bernstein describes here.

However, even in jest, the supposition makes several (I think) good points.

Fact:  the Du Toit family’s Huguenot forebears fled Catholic France’s oppression to settle in the Protestant Dutch Cape colony in about 1792, thus making their appearance in what is today South Africa earlier than many of the Bantu tribes migrating south from Central Africa.  On my paternal grandmother’s side, the Dutch Van Wyks arrived in  the Cape colony even earlier, around 1665, before even the Zulus crossed the Limpopo River in the north.  So “longevity in the country” vis-a-vis Blacks vs. Whites is of dubious value, in my case.  The only Black tribe which predates both Whites and Bantus would be the Bushmen (Nan) tribe, who were more or less exterminated, slaughtered by both Whites and Bantus.

Fact:  a huge number of White South Africans speak at least one African language like Zulu, Ndebele or Sotho, depending on where they live or work.  (My late stepfather was fluent in four African languages, for example, because he worked in the mines for decades, and my father was fluent in Zulu and Sotho — and German, incidentally.)  Back when I lived there, I had at least a little familiarity with Sotho (thanks to my Black Mommy Mary, who raised me as a small child through my teens).  I doubt whether too many Black African-Americans can claim the same about native African languages — hell, they can barely speak English, let alone, say, Masai or Ovambo.  I can also relate many tribal tales and customs (alas, not as many as I used to) that are essentially African in nature.  My African cultural heritage, therefore, is stronger than almost all African-Americans of color.

But when I use the above as justification for calling myself an African-American, I’m told that none of them matter, because I have a white skin.

Racism, anyone?