Cash Commute

One man's crook is another's commuted:

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, former Judge Michael Conahan shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and shared $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Another judge, Mark Ciavarella, was also involved in the illicit scheme, the effects of which are still felt today among victims and families. The scandal is considered Pennsylvania’s largest-ever judicial corruption scheme with the state's supreme court throwing out some 4,000 juvenile convictions involving more than 2,300 kids after the scheme was uncovered.

Must have been a campaign donor...

Word Games

More words for the win:

A spokesperson for the competition told the outlet that the words on the approved list come from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. The spokesperson said: All of the words used in the Scripps National Spelling Bee program are pulled from our official dictionary, Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. During competition, our policy is to accept any correct spelling listed in our official dictionary that isn’t marked archaic or obsolete. The alternate spelling “womyn” is therefore included on our study list because it is listed as an alternate spelling for ‘women’ in Merriam-Webster. In building our study lists, we aim to include alternate spellings for any words that have them listed in Merriam-Webster. The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary is the final authority and sole source for the spelling of all words offered in competition. The X account LibsofTikTok shared an image of the study list featuring the word “womyn.” The list marked the word “women” with two asterisks noting that is the preferred spelling.

But not the approved one...

Green Cops

Biden's EPA goes for the green:

According to court documents, Hart and his accomplices imported banned hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and sold them online for profit. “Once the orders were placed, Hart purchased the refrigerants in Mexico with the help of his conspirators and illegally imported them into the United States concealed in his vehicle,” the DOJ said in a press release. “Thereafter, Hart illegally sold the refrigerants to others in the United States, profiting from the black market for such refrigerants in the United States.” Smuggling banned gases into the United States attracts a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Meanwhile, the EPA attributed the arrest, prosecution, and conviction to “revitalized enforcement and compliance efforts,” which it fears might lose momentum when Trump takes office on January 21st. However, Trump has not indicated that he will open the floodgates of illegal environmental substances into the country. Similarly, while Biden’s EPA celebrates stopping the flow of banned greenhouse gases into the country, the case is similar to others involving smuggling illegal and harmful products. However, such convictions rarely make grand political statements that Biden’s EPA can take credit for to advance the administration’s political climate agenda.

Don't take credit where credit isn't due. Meanwhile:

Government office buildings have an occupancy rate of only 12%, yet the government spends $16 billion a year to operate them. Even the head of the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, works from home in Missouri. “You may be more likely to see a ghost than a bureaucrat haunting the halls of some government buildings in Washington, D.C. these days,” Ernst continued. Office buildings are so empty that the water supply at the office of the Environmental Protection Agency — which is tasked with ensuring clean drinking water — was left stagnant for so long that it developed dangerous bacteria, according to the audit. But unions have demanded that full individual workstations for each employee be maintained for the rare occasions they are used, in addition to demanding that members be allowed to work from home.

Where the government well runs deep...

EV Rules

How the government tried to force EVs on those who didn't want them:

Federal regulators and multinational corporations have attempted to push EVs on the American public in recent years, with the Biden-Harris administration introducing strict tailpipe emissions standards, and major automakers implementing lofty electric production targets. However, widespread EV adoption may not be as feasible as lawmakers and auto executives once claimed, with a new meta-analysis from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) noting EVs can have a variety of drawbacks for consumers when compared to their gas-powered counterparts, including elevated upfront costs, lower resale values, limited driving range and a lack of charging infrastructure. “We argue the EV transition is going to take a lot of government coercion to make happen,” Kenny Stein, vice president of policy at IER and the study’s lead author, told the DCNF. “It is a very difficult process, and it is not a very desirable process to force.”

But they tried it anyway...

Brain Speech

Free speech is literally in our heads:

A classic test of autistic cognition is the pencil-in-the-sweet-tube test. The child is shown a tube of sweets and asked what he (and it is more likely to be a he by at least four to one) thinks is inside. He’s disappointed to discover that rather than the sweets he expected, the tube contains pencils. But now he is asked what another child who had not been shown the contents would think and typically replies, “Pencils!” Normal children can pass this test from about age four and realise that another child would think as they did that the tube contained sweets. One of my own sons, aged about three, had been cautioned by me not to tell his mother that he had bought her a present the day before her birthday. But the moment he heard her coming into the house, he rushed up to her and exclaimed, “Mummy, I mustn’t tell you that I have bought you a present!” Typically for his age and for autistics much older, he had failed what is known as a test of false belief: the ability to realise that others may not know what you know — or in this case, need to be kept in ignorance of it. If you think about it, thought-policing — and indeed all dogmatic intolerance of differing points of view — amounts to an autistic-like denial of what the agent regards as others’ false beliefs. Indeed, leading authorities on Asperger’s syndrome comment that some high-functioning autistics go into so-called “God mode” and become “an omnipotent person who never makes a mistake, cannot be wrong and whose intelligence must be worshipped” (see T. Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome). Clearly though, this cuts both ways, and people who routinely are in ‘God mode’ where others’ speech and beliefs are concerned could be seen as acting like autistics, with thought-policing as an institutionalised deficit in appreciation of false belief.

Censorship is literally a mental condition...

Word Wars

No bad words allowed:

The list of "Banned Words" in the teacher's classroom spanned more than a dozen individual words such as "Ohio," which can mean "weird," "cringe" or "dumb," among Generation Alpha circles; "rizz," which is short for "charisma"; and "skibidi," which refers to a series of videos featuring animated talking heads that emerge from toilets. "Diddy party," "baby oil," "brain rot" and "rage quitting" also made the viral list. The poster further includes a blanket ban on meowing, barking, curse words, racist comments, LGBTQ+ and fat jokes, and references to drugs, Nazis or the Holocaust. School administrators told Fox News Digital in an emailed statement Thursday afternoon that students helped craft the list "as an important lesson of civic responsibility … promoting empathy and awareness of how language affects others." They added that the "chart has not been displayed since the first quarter." "Our goal is not to censor or stifle student speech, but to guide students toward language that fosters a positive and inclusive learning environment," officials from the rural district located in southwestern Iowa added. Saying "any of these words listed" was punishable by a 30-minute detention, according to a note at the bottom of the poster. A parent told FIRE that at least 10 students have been disciplined, but school administrators said "consequences are not based solely upon using particular words, unless they are considered vulgar, lewd, threatening, a substantial disruption of the school environment, or bullying toward another student."

Keep ypur animal noises to yourself...

Unsettling Accounts

Welcome to Canada:

On November 20, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruled that the township of Emo and its mayor, Harold McQuaker, 77, had discriminated against an LGBTQ group, under the Ontario Human Rights Code, by denying its request to proclaim June as Pride Month. Borderland Pride had requested Emo make the Pride Month declaration and requested the township fly a "LGBTQ2" flag, despite Emo not having an official flag pole. McQuaker was further found to have violated the human rights code by making a "discriminatory remark" during the town's council meeting about the flag request, saying that there was no flag for the "other side of the coin… for straight people." Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson ordered the township to pay a fine of $10,000, while McQuaker was ordered to take a "Human Rights 101" course and pay a $5,000 fine to Borderland Pride. However, McQuaker publicly said that he wouldn't pay the fine, calling it "extortion."

Because it is...