Would you respect a judge that quotes Harry Potter in official documents on a regular basis?

YES! If the judge used the Harry Potter quotes to advance sound legal reasoning, I’d consider it a potentially clever and humorous way to inject some levity into something that’s otherwise likely mundane and dry. Also I guarantee you a judge has quoted those books in opinions, along with every other popular piece of literature.

I’m sorry to remind everybody incensed here, but the professionals in the profession get to decide what is and is not professional, and the legal profession has a long history of quoting material that’s non-germane. You can be upset about it if you want, but we’re fortunate that judges explain their reasoning at all.

Quoting a book you don’t like doesn’t make a decision bad. A decision is bad if it’s wrong on the law, and as I think everybody in this thread knows, the Bible isn’t the law of the land! Quoting non-law in order to bolster a line of reasoning isn’t good, bad, harmful, or harmless by itself, because the reasoning is the important thing. The Bible has been used to stand for many bad positions–but if it hadn’t been, those positions would still have been bad!

While you lot are pulling out your pitchforks because a judge quoted the Bible for the billionth time in the last 200 years, did any of you even bother to find out what the decisions actually were?

Not what any of this is about, but okay.

Eh… this is kind of nothing. Jurists quote religious texts all the time. Judge Ho–the topic of the article–doesn’t quote the Bible in a particularly eloquent fashion, but he’s far from the first US judge to use a biblical quote to make a point.

And yes, they quote the Quran too–just not as much since not as many of them are familiar with it. Law is a reasoning profession, and people who practice it like finding analogies and drawing distinctions. If they see that a set of facts is like or unlike something from ancient history, they’re likely to bring it up. They’ll bring up song lyrics, mythology, popular proverbs, ancient legal texts, moral fables–anything with any reasoning or legal thinking in it.

Trump appointees are deserving of criticism for horrible jurisprudence, terrible judgment and insight, and piss-poor qualifications. There are plenty of things to hate about lots of them, but “they quote the Bible sometimes” isn’t one.

Yes–although the ticket prices for her school have always been reasonable, so it’s not as big a perk as it would be in some places. The free meals, however, have reliably been incredible and well worth the headache of chaperoning.

We’ve been very fortunate to have never had any “incidents”–most of the kids appeae willing to save their drinking and debauchery for after prom–but it’s always a real worry that the next morning we’ll read about one of her kids drunk driving his car into a tree.

Mine when I was in school was entirely forgettable. But! I married a teacher, and until the pandemic we chaperoned prom almost every year. And that was reliably awesome. We may get back to it eventually. The kids are always proud of their outfits, and it’s a small, rural school, so even though there are cliques, it’s still mostly an everybody-in-it-together atmosphere. We’ve never really been party types, but getting to dance with my wife at prom every year is something I miss.

Have fun. If you have your way, it might be for the last time.

How much are you getting paid? I only wish I was as passionate about my job as you are about yours.

Yup. Appeal it, drag it out, mire it up. If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.

That’s nice.

Just to be on the safe side, better vote blue anyway.

Democrats all the way down the ticket, national, state, and local. The Democrats are the party of human rights. That means reproductive rights, the right to privacy, the right to free expression and bodily integrity, the right to be free from government interference in one’s person and home, the right to vote, the right to criticize the government, the right to be paid a day’s wage for a day’s work and the right to bargain collectively for it, and the right to believe and practice or not practice the faith of your choosing, even if it offends the fascists in your local church.

Vote blue and save the Republic, polls be damned.

These are all really excellent questions. My son skipped a grade early in gradeschool, and I am fortunate enough to have a friend who had a similar experience as this young lady (albeit not to the same extent) being hyper-accelerated through school, so we were able to interview him about his experience when making decisions about how to handle our exceptional kiddo’s education.

It was not a fun conversation, and as a result we elected to just let our son take advanced classes when possible and not really push to have him skip additional grades or do any of the wacky stuff with enrolling in college as a child or what have you. Of course we’re going to push him to take stuff that is challenging whenever possible, and I’d love for him to graduate high school with as much college credit as possible–but I’m not about to steal his youth in pursuit of putting a PhD on his wall before he’s old enough to vote.

The short version is that our friend was a very miserable child. His advancement essentially meant he had no peers, and especially among teenagers, the acceleration just put a bullseye on his back, since the people who surrounded him either resented him or saw him as a target for bullying. Even professional educators at times resented him. He was adamant that it was a thing he would never put his own children through.

Is that a typical experience? I have no idea; after all, being a child in higher education is already well outside ordinary experience. But the story was enough to make me worry for the child whenever I read a headline like this.

Trailer’s fine–tells the story. This season was always supposed to be about correcting some of the unforced errors they committed on release. Still early to tell whether it will pan out (and this definitely isn’t everything that needs to be course corrected). I’m trying to give it a fair shake, and I’ve been having a good time so far, since I haven’t really spent much time with the game since launch other than to check in here and there. We’ll see if I still feel that way after another ten hours.

If anybody is a fan of trailer music like I am, the track is Hypersonic - Believe the Hype

Lol, as if liberals have a right to speak.

Careful there, people might figure out who you really are. Tighten that mask up, Socko.

AI = Absent Indians

I hope you never find yourself standing in judgment for the worst thing you ever did.

This is fantastic news, but they kind of buried the lede here:

A separate study looking at a new slimming jab has found that it could be much more effective than those already on the market. Retatrutide, a weekly injection, works by suppressing appetite and also by helping the body burn more fat, according to its phase 2 clinical trial.

The trial of 338 participants living with obesity showed that participants lost 24% of their body weight over a 48-week period. [emphasis added] Researchers say it is more effective for weight loss than Ozempic or Wegovy, which only work by suppressing appetite.

That’s a quarter of a person’s mass in less than a year. For persons with obesity, that’s absolutely insane. It’s better than gastric bypass surgery (and depending on your perspective, comparing risk of complications, long-term compliance requirements, and potential side effects, semaglutide already is). It would be like taking semaglutide and also taking meth for a year, but without ruining your life.

Now if only the taxpayers who paid for the research owned the patent. …

Jail them, and jail their “volunteer campaign manager” for conspiracy.

The nepo babies wouldn’t serve–same as always. And the political unpopularity of conscription has never changed. The last war draft is still in living memory, and US current military activity hasn’t been an improvement in terms of public appetite.

The US introduces conscription again, and there’ll be riots–and I don’t mean “some kids camped at college and the jackboots locked them up” protests; it’ll be government-building burning, widespread-looting riots.

If you want to do conscription, the kids have to trust the government not to kill them for oil.

As an American, I’d be much more receptive to the idea if I knew it would be Swedes, rather than Americans, trespassing on my land.

I’m happy with Biden. Like, very happy. Biden’s awesome.

So you’re not running then? Amidst the rampant, unchecked political corruption you claim to observe in every direction, the solution you in your wisdom have found most powerful is to complain about it on the internet.