Prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against the Texas judge who had a defense lawyer put in handcuffs last year during a contentious hearing. Well, former Texas judge, because she was suspended after the incident and then lost the primary election in March. Who if anyone was acting professionally during that hearing? Hard to tell from a transcript, but only one of them still has her job.
Police in California have finally captured the “Irvine Pasta Bandit,” a 28-year-old man who allegedly bought LEGO sets, removed the more valuable pieces, replaced them with pasta, and returned the packages for refunds. That may not sound very lucrative, but apparently if you do it “at least 70 times,” you could end up with “roughly $34,000.” Those numbers would work out to about $486 per set, so I’m guessing it was more than 70 times, but could certainly be wrong.
What “truly outrages” Quebec’s Minister of Agriculture? Selling fake maple syrup, that’s what (or, at least, syrup sold as “pure” but cut with 50% cane sugar). And rightly so. The CBC notes that Canadians should be on the lookout for cans bearing the name “Steve Bourdeau” or that of his company, the catchily-named “9227-8712 Québec Inc.,” as well as cans with fake labels someone (probably named Steve Bourdeau) has been going around and attaching to them in an attempt to cover up that information.
“Sullivan & Cromwell is one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in the country,” notes the New York Times, in an article reporting that the firm had apologized for filing a motion drafted with generative AI’s “help.” The firm told the court that not all of the three dozen errors in its motion were AI-related, but that some did seem to be the product of AI “hallucinations.” It therefore joins the ever-growing list of lawyers, some of them old and prestigious, who have been forced to admit this garbage somehow got into their work product.
As Above the Law reports, the list also includes whoever’s representing “Joe Exotic,” currently imprisoned but still worrying about tigers. Well, not the list of those who have admitted they screwed up, because this one denied it, but the list of those who got punished for it.
As I discussed in detail in a draft I now see I never got around to posting, Kardashian didn’t pass the California bar exam last year. This is not too terribly surprising given that she didn’t even go to college, much less law school, and that it isn’t that clear how often she showed up at the law firm where she claimed to be apprenticing. Given that the draft also discusses an interview in which Kardashian blamed ChatGPT for “[making] me fail tests,” I’m seriously thinking about finishing it.
“Penn & Teller are not the first magician-skeptics to use their skills as manipulators of perception to expose offstage practices that defy logic and reason,” this amicus brief points out, but they might be the first magician-skeptics to file an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court. In the (excellent) brief, they support the petitioner’s argument that the “investigative hypnosis” technique used in his case was “flim-flam” and “junk science of the worst kind.” As they point out, they have investigated this very subject before. See Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Hypnosis (Showtime television broadcast, aired Sep. 2, 2004). Not the only authority they cite by any means, but enough to persuade me.
