Contempt of Clerk: Reprimanded in 2023 for an 'Overly Harsh' Chambers, a Second Circuit Judge Has Now Been Reprimanded Again — the Second-Offense Sentence Is More Training

Three days ago this page noted a judge whose sentence for misconduct-plus-lying-about-it was, in effect, homework — apology letters, on a deadline. Today the experiment reports its next result: the homework does not get done, and the school assigns more homework. This is no longer an observation about toothless self-policing; it is a controlled trial, run twice on the same judge by the same chief judge, and the finding is in. Lifetime tenure was designed to free the bench from fear of kings and Congresses, and as a side effect it runs the cleanest experiment available in what human beings do when consequences are removed — Merriam is both the control group and the result. Meanwhile the 30,000 people who staff the federal courts remain the only workforce in America stationed outside the employment laws their employers spend all day interpreting, and their protection, on second offense, is a management seminar. The law is majestic. Its authors, granted immunity from it, turn out to be exactly the species this publication has always said they were.

Source: Above the Law

Two Professional Rooftoppers — Stars of a Netflix Documentary About Their Own Climbing — Scaled the Empire State Building's Antenna for a Marriage Proposal, Unfurled a Banner About the Love of Power, Posted the Photos Themselves, and Were Arrested at the Bottom

Ivan Kuznetsov and Angela Nikolau climbed 1,454 feet to declare that the power of love beats the love of power, then documented the felony from altitude for an audience that was never the fiancée — it was the feed — because the modern daredevil does not fear the authorities so much as the possibility of going unwitnessed, and the charges (burglary, reckless endangerment, possession of burglar's tools) are, in the end, just engagement metrics.

Source: Los Angeles Times

A Maryland Man Allegedly Burglarized a Verizon Store at Dawn, Cut Himself on the Window, Then Flagged Down the Responding Officers — To Report His Own Car Stolen From Across the Street While He Was Inside

The 29-year-old stood before officers wearing the blood that matched the window, denying on bodycam a burglary to the very police he had summoned to avenge his stolen getaway car — the only man in America robbed mid-robbery, and the rare defendant whose arrest report doubles as proof that the universe, unlike the Second Circuit, still runs a functioning disciplinary system.

Source: FOX 5 DC

Thailand's Civil-Service Exam Was Rigged So Thoroughly — Candidates Paying Up to 800,000 Baht Each, Scores Altered on the Answer Sheets — That the Prime Minister Held Up the Doctored Evidence at a Press Conference

The exam to select nearly 7,000 guardians of local government became a price list — thousands reportedly paid between 350,000 and 800,000 baht to pass, ten people were caught red-handed with doctored results, and 48 of 79 sampled answer sheets did not match the posted scores — which is to say the one thing the Department of Local Administration administered with genuine diligence was the corruption of its own entrance requirements; the university that ran the exam, invited to explain itself to parliament, did not show up, presumably having learned from its own test-takers that attendance is optional.

Source: Bangkok Post

A Retired Alabama Man Wired His Entire Life Savings — More Than $222,000 — to a Stranger Posing as a Young Woman With a Crypto Opportunity; the Government Is Now Suing the Money To Get It Back

A man who would never hand $200 to a stranger on his porch wired a quarter of a million to one with a profile photo, because the proposition that a young woman had discovered both cryptocurrency and him, specifically, in the same month struck him as the likeliest explanation available — the scam industry's genius is not forging evidence but knowing its mark will do that part himself.

Source: Cryptopolitan

Caught Dumping Raw Sewage Beside the Everglades in 2023, Twin Brothers Completed Their Diversion Program, Went Home, and Spent the Next Three Years Not Moving a Single Pipe

Given three years, a brush with prosecution, and a court-supervised second chance, the twins conducted a comprehensive review of their sewage infrastructure and elected to change nothing — the diversion program diverted everything except the effluent.

Source: WPLG Local 10

A Husband Slept With the Family's Surrogate — and Was Exposed Two Years Later by His Toddler's Routine Blood Test, the One Piece of Evidence He Had Personally Fathered

Most affairs require a detective; this one arrived pre-documented, since the husband chose the single form of infidelity that ships with a birth certificate — genetics being the one witness that neither recants nor deletes its texts.

Source: Irish Mirror

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Rented Madison Square Garden for a 1,000-Guest Wedding Decorated With Large Photos of Themselves at Every Age — and the Empire State Building Formally Lit Itself Up in Tribute

Every couple decorates the reception with photographs of themselves; it takes a particular altitude of self-regard to do it in a 19,000-seat arena while a skyscraper changes its clothes in your honor — and it takes the modern celebrity press, which spent the Republic's 250th birthday narrating a guest list from behind a barricade, to certify the whole liturgy as news.

Source: CBS News

Brown's Take-Home 'Honor Code' Midterm in Mathematical Economics Produced 40 Perfect Scores Out of 86 Students; at the Proctored In-Person Final the Class Average Was 48 — and 22 of the Perfect Scorers Simply Did Not Show Up

Source: El País