Folly of the DaySolicitor Told a Family Court Four Times That He Was at the Ealing Office. He Was in Munich.
A single lie is a lapse; four is a policy. What undid him was not the trip to Munich — half the profession has taken a hearing from somewhere it should not have — but the assumption underneath the answer, which is that a court is an audience rather than a tribunal, and that the man in the little rectangle controls what is knowable about himself. He had it exactly backwards. The whole apparatus of a legal system is a machine for establishing where people actually were, and he had spent sixteen years operating it on other people without once suspecting it could be turned round and pointed at him. He was not caught because the lie was clever or stupid. He was caught because a landline rang in an empty room in Ealing, and nobody picked it up.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireMen Who Filmed Themselves Rioting So That Everyone Would Know It Was Them Were Identified by Police as the Men Who Filmed Themselves Rioting
The oldest form of criminal stupidity was leaving something behind at the scene; the modern form is uploading it. What has actually changed is the motive — a fingerprint is an accident, but a video is an argument, and every one of these men filmed himself because he believed that what he was doing would look, to some audience he had in mind, magnificent. That is the confession the footage really contains. They did not fear being seen. They required it. The police were simply the one audience they had not budgeted for, and the only one paying close attention.
Source: ITV News Meridian
The WireMountain Rescue Callouts for the Young Have Doubled, and the Volunteers Keep Finding Them in Trainers
The photograph is of a person standing on a summit, and the person standing on the summit is meant to signify competence, endurance, and a life lived at some altitude above the ordinary. The mountain is merely the backdrop; the subject is the self. That is the whole difficulty. A backdrop does not require boots, or a forecast, or the humbling suspicion that a Welsh hill in December has been killing better-equipped people for three centuries. Somewhere below the summit is an unpaid volunteer in his fifties, walking uphill at two in the morning with a stretcher, who will not appear in the frame.
Source: PetaPixel (reporting The Economist)
Black-Robed EgomaniaCity Court Judge Coached a Neighbour Through Getting Her Traffic Ticket Dismissed, Which Is Not a Service the Court Offers to Non-Neighbours
The favour is small, which is precisely the point — nobody sells the judiciary for a covered number plate. What she spent was the only asset a court actually holds, which is the belief among people who know no judges personally that the same thing happens to them as happens to everyone else. She will have experienced it as ordinary decency toward a neighbour, and that is the characteristic disease of the robe: after enough years of being the room's moral instrument, one stops distinguishing between what is right and what one has decided to do. Somewhere in Mount Vernon, a stranger paid that fine.
Source: New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, via lohud/AOL
The Siren LedgerRetired Man Wired His Life Savings to a 23-Year-Old Named Bella Who Turned Out to Be a Telegram Account
The scam is not really the wallets, or the fake trading platform, or the flawless attentiveness of a stranger who has done this two hundred times. The scam is the premise, accepted on the first day and never revisited: that a woman of twenty-three had scrolled past the entire supply of men her own age and settled, with real feeling, on him. Everything after that followed logically. Once a man has agreed to be the exception, the transfers are not credulity, they are consistency — and each one costs less to make than the alternative, which is to sit alone in a quiet house and work out what the last eight months actually were.
Source: WAFF 48 News
LazyTownHaulier Facing the Loss of His Operator's Licence Declined to Attend the Hearing About Whether He Should Lose His Operator's Licence
Every regulated trade in Britain runs on the same quiet bargain: you may keep the licence provided you can be bothered to answer for it. He had already declined the paperwork, the maintenance, the tachograph and the correspondence, so declining the hearing was merely the last item in a consistent set. What is striking is the arithmetic. A single day in a room was the entire price of keeping a business, and he judged the day too expensive. The Commissioner, who turned up, reached a different valuation.
Source: Motor Transport
The VillagesActor Informs the Public That No One Cares About Ballet or Opera, and Separately That His Own Acting Is Top-Tier
It takes a particular kind of education to survey four hundred years of an art form and conclude that its difficulty is insufficient public interest in oneself. But the actor is not the whole story. He said something silly in a room built expressly to encourage him to say things, to journalists whose business model depends on his saying them, for an audience that will be told tomorrow that he is fearlessly candid. He is the product. The interview is the factory. Everyone involved knows what is being manufactured, and only one of them is young enough to have an excuse.
Source: Yahoo Entertainment
Campus WatchCollege President Decided a Standard Short Story Was Political, Ordered the English Professor to Stop Teaching It, and Sacked Her the Next Day
An administrator who has determined that a short story is political has, in the same motion, declared himself competent to say what literature is for — a judgement reached without reading much of it, on the authority of a job title invented in the 1970s. The remarkable part is the speed. Twenty years of teaching examined and disposed of between one day and the next, by a man who had to be told the story existed. Universities were once run by people who had themselves been humiliated by a difficult book. It shows.
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)