I think you’re on to something. IMHO, so much (well sourced, entirely justified) hatred is on Ethan Couch, that there’s there’s now this script that the solution is to bring the full weight of the adult court system on minors.

This has been under-reported. The parents did fuck up. As much as “affluenza” is the abuse of a 10 cent sociological term, he was a minor at the time of the accident. You couldn’t hold him responsible in the same way as you would an adult. Perhaps the judge’s error was in not taking the hint from Ethan’s defense…

I think “jail” and “prison” are used interchangably in English across the Atlantic —it’s mostly a technical distinction.

I may have put the problem in the wrong terms, but my point is that while Rikers may have many different portions to the compound, the same cookie-cutter attitude prevails throughout —i.e., until recently, solitary confinement was used in the same way for the mentally ill having episodes and young people getting into…

I wouldn’t problematize the backgrounds of C/O’s, so much as problematizing Rikers itself. You would not need so many C/O’s, and pull so many strings, if you didn’t have a jail facility that is chronically overpopulated with a volatile mixture of young people, the destitute, the mentally ill, and hardened repeat…

Puerto Vallarta was likely just the port of exit. It’s not in the U.S. (so no Customs doing background checks), and it’s on the Pacific. That makes it possible to charter seaborne transportation —a cruise ship or a freighter— to a country in Asia without an extradition treaty (China, Vietnam, Indonesia).

Mexico actually doesn’t allow for bounty hunting. It’s easy to forget this, but in the case that made him nationally recognizable, Dog went down to Mexico to go after the Max Factor rapist and they both were arrested: http://www.today.com/popculture/bou…

How about we make our human centipede, then feed some really hot chili peppers to whoever would be the initial head —let’s just say Trump— and then, surprise! sewing Trump’s face to the butt end so that the centipede becomes a closed loop (like an ouroborus).

Extreme right and extreme left don’t really get to it. America’s electoral system really dismisses the left/right paradigm —the Democratic/Republican alignment to left and right is only a phenomenon that breaks out in 1968, and it’s been punctuated by moments where both parties coopted each other’s positions…

You know what this means, right?

You’re right that the downside of waiting is that those voting on it will tend to approve anything. But that’s a function of both the union administration waiting and some pennywise/pound foolishness in the rank-and-file.

Inevitably work cultures that have “every Thursday we do cocktails” become work cultures that have “every Thursday we have an A.A. meeting” in about... what? 2 years? 5 years?

The height of hypocrisy: attacking the media, when you are the media.

Just to point out, as someone who works in a public sector union: working “without a contract” has different meanings depending on the context. In some areas, it means you’re working under the exact same terms as you were under the prior agreement —e.g., all the work rules are the same, there’s simply no contractual…

FWIW, Richard Pryor was also raped as a child (IIRC, it was when he was six years old) by a white pedophile who thought of him as easy prey, especially since he was born into a brothel.

I agree with you, that this person shouldn’t be left without feeling some consequences.

First, “small business” is always a suspect claim. Because working alongside the dumb schmuck Mike who opened up his House of Ribs down the street from a synagogue and mosque is an investor whose real hustle is wholesale barbecue equipment —and he’s not a small businessman at all.

Japanese war reparations are the biggest joke. Because of Japan’s small size, the U.S. allowed the Japanese to repay war debts by making certain investments in the countries that they had formerly occupied (factories mainly). So Japan got exactly what they wanted when they committed slaughter across the continent,…

The thing is, with the old type of authoritarian asshole boss, there was a felt limit to their control.

Maybe pedantic, but worth repeating: Rikers is not a prison. It’s a holding area for people awaiting trial.