World War II liveblog: September 8, 1940 British HQ reserved the codeword "Cromwell" as a signal to the British Army that all soldiers should move to battle stations because Ze Germans are coming. It is a 20th century version of Paul Revere, Cromwell and church bells if the Army should mob...

Government regulation has a bad effect . Incandescent bulbs are outlawed because they're deemed too expensive. So today the last factory making such bulbs in the US has closed. The CFLs are almost all made in China. Thanks, Congress! But in seriousness, it begs the question if a shift to green ener...

NOW it's getting ridiculous . Obama hires an Asian carp czar! The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes. ...

I feel like Oakland PD is really trying to tell people "don't call 911, we don't want to help you". It's a nice end-around to tell people they can only call 911 on land lines.

One of my business mottos will be "I really want to service you well." That will hang on a giant banner in my Vietnamese sweat shop.

BP releases its own report on the oil spill . Predictably, they spread the blame to a bunch of other companies. They accept blame for the most minor thing, for a failure to correctly predict pressure readings. Even then, they blame mechanical failure too. In an internal report released Wednesday, B...

For some equality, here is the Guardian's take on a Tea Party rally in London . It is dripping with the same contempt as the Telegraph's article and is hilariously biased in the opposite direction. They come pretty close to just saying that the Tea Party is the illegitimate red-headed bastard-child ...

The UK is having a debate about the Tea Party. But in true UK fashion, I don't mean civilized debate. i mean the Telegraph declares that the BBC completely fails. It goes without saying that this is a partisan article, but it's so hilariously over the top that it's worth it. With the smug incompreh...

You've changed my mind. VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

That's not entirely true. You could have gone with the public defender at no cost to you and taken their advice. You never face the court with no representation at all. But you seem to be criticizing the fact that more money can buy better representation and that the police were determined to drop t...

It's not positive spin, that's the basis for the system. But I think it's a mistake to automatically assume that the government has an advantage because it has more resources than any individual person. The thing about criminal law is that the government has the burden to prove beyond a reasonable d...

Washington Post gets trolled HARD by Twitter. http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/scavenger/2010/09/07/ba-RepJackKimble_0502198188450x323.jpg The WaPo staff responded harshly to this, calling out Rep. Jack Kimble, a Republican representative from the 54th district in California. He's proof t...

It recalls something that Chou once told me about law. The law is not about the search for truth, it's about the adversarial process. Two sides fight as hard as they can and facts are decided from their arguments. If one side doesn't want to fight or is too weak to defend itself, then that's too fuc...

Paul Krugman teeters toward madness Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on g...

Labor protests cripple France and the UK's mass transit systems , upping the ante on austerity measures. Public transit ground to a halt across France and on the London Tube on Tuesday, with tourists and commuters bearing the brunt of a wave of discontent over government austerity measures. French ...