Chez Chesler

Wichita Eagle | 07/27/2005 | Marriage to minor can't stop sex charge I've asked before, if statutory rape is because minors can't give consent to sex, and if marriage is no longer a bar to prosecution of rape, why isn't it rape when marriage exists in which one (or both) members are below the age of consent.

It is unlawful in Kansas for a person under 16 to have sex -- unless they are married, [Whitney] Watson [, spokesman for Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline] said. Otherwise, the law says they can't consent to have sex. He didn't know how many people under 16 might be married.

Notwithstanding that analysis and the headline, this Nebraska case may not address the issue as the child bride, now 14, was already pregnant when she got married at age 13.

"The idea... is repugnant to me," said Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning. ... He said the marriage is valid, thanks to the "ridiculous" Kansas law, "but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to stand by while a grown man... has a relationship with a 13-year-old -- now 14-year-old -- girl."

It would be interesting if Bruning were presented with a case of two 16-year-olds who were lawfully married outside Nebraska and without evidence of pre-marital sex.

Normally I wouldn't post, or even discuss, the contents of a dream. Unless it's about discovering the resonance structure of the benzene ring, dreams tend to be personal and only brilliant and interesting to the dreamer. But since we're supposed to be blogging in our pajamas, I suppose dreams are fair game. Somehow the topic was colleges, and someone (maybe the first person) explained to someone else: "There are three Harvards. First is the undergraduate college. That's the most famous experience. Then there are all the researchers. Finally, there are the alumni, and that's why the Harvard Club of New York is bigger than the Harvard Club of Boston."

Teens challenge mall's new escort policy - Boston.com - Mass. - News

Hoping to crack down on unruly behavior, the mall managers will ... require shoppers under 18 to be accompanied by an adult on Friday and Saturday between 4 p.m. and closing time [starting] on Sept. 9. The new restriction will be policed by security staff checking photo identification cards at the mall's entrances.

A Toys R Us opened in my neighborhood when I was about 14. This was my first opportunity to go to this television icon (this was in the late 1970s -- the north Bronx can be a backwater relative to popular suburban culture.) A sign on the door prohibited those 16 and under from enterin alone. Even though I am a middle-aged parent today, and do regularly use the local Toys R Us, I still resent that policy, and have that much less goodwill towards that company as a result. The Mall probably has the right to exclude this class, and maybe it will realize increased revenues from more sales from fewer customers who are there primarily to shop as compared to many young visitors who may shop incidentally to hanging out, but this policy is not without a long-term downside. I should note that I have recently begun to take advantage of the public spaces provided by the Burlington Mall as a non-shopper, to enjoy the air conditioning and to keep my children occupied. We usually end up using the laptops at the Verizon FIOS kiosk or throwing pennies at the animatronic alligator at the Rainforest Cafe. I understand that malls provide varying attractions to bring in potential customers (some more ornate than others) and I usually drop a few dollars, especially at the Chick-Fil-A at the food court, when we visit. I'm doing my part to breed the next generation of mall rats; I hope they have an air-conditioned placed to hang out when they become teenagers.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: History (Horse's Pass) There's a piece that goes around the 'net that claims that the US standard railroad gauge, 4 feet, 8.5 inches, is based on the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Snopes points out that this isn't quite true, except to note that horse-drawn stuff tends to be of the same general size, and reminding us that there was no one standard railroad gauge through the time of the Civil War. On the other hand, I've seen fire hydrants on city streets with a casting date of the late 1800s. I imagine that this means that fire trucks must have hoses today that fit the same fittings as they did more than 100 years ago.

A (the?) loyal reader asked me if I'd moved this blog or left Comcast. It turns out that I was over quota on my Comcast web site (where this blog is hosted.) Neither Comcast nor Blogger returned any kind of error message :-(. I cleared out some old images and all is well for now. Although Comcast has regularly increased bandwidth and mail storage, total web site space has remained at 25 Meg. I was going to write about this because over on The Volokh Conspiracy Eugene has written on the "Suicide Bombers as Cowards" trope. (He updates the post to note "Chris Lansdown puts it well in the comments: '[T]argeting a group that's less able to defend itself to increase the likelihood of success rather than to decrease the likelihood of personal peril isn't cowardly, it's dastardly (which is worse, though a different sort of malfeasance).'") I'd commented on this some time back on Usenet. For a while, when World.std.com was my ISP (or more accurately public-access Unix) I was using an "X-No-Archive: No" header. Deja (formerly DejaNews, and now with older archives Google Groups) and other archivers (are there any other archivers?) are supposed to follow the convention that Usenet messages with an "X-No-Archive: Yes" header, or as the first line in a message, will not be archived. Therefore "X-No-Archive: No" should me "No, I do not ask that you not archive this." To make it unambiguous, I also used the even less conventional non-standard header (all headers that start with X- are non-standard, just like the alt.* Usenet hierarchy) "X-Yes-Archive: Yes", meaning "Yes, please archive this" and also "X-Maybe-Archive: Maybe" just for completeness. None of those message are in the Google archive. Google should fix this. Meanwhile, my local PC crashed after I'd written this the first time and was just tracking down URLs :-(

Child rapist OKs surgical castration They're stating the converse, "a child rapist agreed to undergo surgical castration and serve 25 years in jail rather than face a possible life sentence". Is there a difference? (If I were 52 years old and had urges to rape young girls, and was about to spend the next quarter century in jail anyway, maybe I'd rather do it without my testicles.)

The Volokh Conspiracy - One More Oral Argument Meltdown: On The Volokh ConspiracyTodd Zywicki reports of an oral argument break down:

JUDGE: Counsel, you say that your failure to meet the deadline was an act of civil disobedience, designed to demonstrate the injustice of the court's approach in this case? And that as a result, we should reverse the trial court's dismissal of the case and remand? COUNSEL: Yes, your honor. JUDGE: Now counsel, you do understand how "civil disobedience" works, don't you? COUNSEL: I don't understand the question, your honor. JUDGE: Well, the way that civil disobedience works is that you believe the law to be unjust, and so you are willing to be punished for violating it in order to demonstrate the injustice of the law. For this to be a true act of civil disobedience, therefore, you would have to be willing to accept the punishment, and through that willingness to accept the punishment, you demonstrate the injustice of the law. So, for instance, Martin Luther King's act of civil disobedience was his willingness to be arrested and go to jail in order to demonstrate the injustice of the laws. So, if this was a true act of civil disobedience on your part, aren't we obliged to affirm the ruling of the district court dismissing the case? COUNSEL (after long pause): Um, your honor, I would like to amend my argument...

Dilan Esper comments:

Funny story, but it raises a serious issue-- I don't think a lot of people understand how civil disobedience works.

On the other hand, sometimes a protest is simply a protest. My freshman year in high school (which means you should probably stop reading here) just as NYC was going into its financial crisis, the Bd of Ed dumped a teacher from HQ onto Bronx Science, causing us to lose the most junior faculty member. A bunch of us protested. The Times picked up the story (Dec. 4, 1975, IIRC). We assembled outside the school for a few periods after lunch. The next day our social studies teacher said "I am allowed to deduct 5 points from your final grade for cutting a class, but I will not do so, but I expect a 10,000 word essay tomorrow on why you (who were not here) were cutting class." We groaned. He said "Those of you who groaned have just demonstrated that you were not out there in principle, you were out there to skip class. When I marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1968 to Jay Street, I knew that I could lose my job, but I was willing to do that, because that was the price of civil disobedience. Blah, blah, blah." (He ultimately told us we didn't have to write the essays.) A few months later he was "excessed" as the budget crisis deepened. I saw him leaving the school. I thought but didn't ask him if he was glad he had lost his livelihood, and if he wasn't, did it prove that he was a hypocrite for telling the students that were not sincere for demonstrating against budget cuts and reassignments.

5 hurt in PawSox fireworks blast - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - R.I. - News

The Pawtucket Red Sox canceled plans for Fourth of July fireworks at McCoy Stadium last night as a precaution after an explosion during Sunday's display slightly injured five employees of a pyrotechnic company. But Pawtucket fire and public safety officials urged the PawSox to cancel last night's fireworks until investigators could better understand why a fireworks shell exploded so close to the ground, setting off other fireworks prematurely. Pawtucket's ''public safety director, along with the fire chief and the police chief, thought it was best that we all sit back and analyze what happened before we rush into another show," said PawSox president Mike Tamburro. ''There are certainly plenty of other nights for fireworks." However, Tamburro stressed that he remains confident in Telstar's safety record, noting that the 26-year-old company has staged dozens of fireworks displays for the team over the last decade without injuries. ''This really might be a case of just a freak accident," he said. ''Sometimes it's freak accidents that cause the most problems." Telstar's Bergeron said the accident occurred midway through the show when a shell exploded either on takeoff or as it was falling back to the ground, sending a cascade of hot embers into fireworks that were supposed to be launched during the grand finale. Firefighters said one crate of fireworks tipped over, sending fireworks shooting toward a group of employees near the launch site, in a parking lot behind the right field wall.

Remember kids, always leave fireworks to the professionals to guarantee safety.