Contempt of court that arises during a trial has zero effect on the outcome. A judge can throw you in jail for violating decorum, much less violating an order.

Trump’s legal team needs to watch My Cousin Vinny again.

Ivanka is flailing. She can lie for her father and face jail; plead the Fifth and try to maintain her innocence independently: or tell the truth and send trump to jail.

Five week trial and a 4 hour jury verdict? That’s insane. The jury listened to a month plus of evidence and came to a verdict before they bothered to order food.

The 1% really believe AI is their golden ticket to get rid of all of us. They’re going after professions with strong unions first and publicly, so that they can try to poison us all against collective bargaining, which is our only chance against them.

When a character endures for 60 years, as Kirk has, it’s going to need an update. I’m not knocking Chris Pine, but I think what he was given to work with was shallow.

Kirk had a lot of layers to him, but he was also developed in the 60s cultural context. Hugh Hefner was a sexual freedom icon. The culture up until then was incredibly puritanical. Kirk being so lascivious and women loving him for it was liberating.

Now, we’re much more in touch with reality. Men in positions of power being sexually suggestive with women they employ is deplorable. We live in a different world now.

To endure as an icon, Kirk has to change. Nice to see more thoughtful writers get a chance to bring the character to this generation. I sincerely hope that decades from now new writers will adapt Kirk to make him outgrow our archaic and comparatively barbarous values.

A thought experiment occurred to me. What is the absolute best subject for a zero tolerance policy? Genocide is the first thought. The most horrific evil that could ever be inflicted.

But let’s say hypothetically, there was a virus that was highly-transmissible and has a 100% fatality rate. A virus killing all of mankind. And let’s say somehow this virus is sentient. We have no idea how it works, but we can confirm that it thinks, feels, etc. The virus is provably sentient for our hypothetical purposes.

If someone develops an absolute cure to the disease, it will save everyone, but it will also wipe out the sentient virus. That is technically genocide, but it saves all life from death. Should a zero tolerance policy govern? Or can we at least have a conversation about wiping out the sentient virus?

Zero tolerance policies ensure injustice in outlier cases. Yes, it’s unethical to interfere in a civilization’s development 99.9% of the time, but there are always exceptions. Ignoring outliers is pretending your system is above the fundamental laws of the universe.