#bellicose litigant

[agentfascinateur]

“If a blog post is evidence of collaboration, that’s a stance that’s somewhat hostile to the First Amendment”

The company filed in the Northern District of Texas, where it will appear before Judge Reed O’Connor, who holds $15,000 of stock in Tesla, Musk’s other company. (Earlier this week, Media Matters lost its bid to have O’Connor recuse himself.) Media Matters has also filed to dismiss the case, which O’Connor has not yet ruled on; in the meantime, he has ordered that Media Matters must comply with an expansive discovery request from X’s lawyers.

[georgeadvocate1]

Advocates in Bangalore

About George Advocate

George & Co. is one of the best law firms with the best advocates in Bangalore with 25 years of Experience and has substantial practice, deals with all aspects of Indian Law. We recognize the need to build on the past, and change with time, to better meets our client’s goals. Our professional team of lawyers offers sound advice and practical solutions to our clients.

Services

Civil Lawyers

Real Estate Lawyers

Property Lawyers

Family and Divorce Lawyers

Civil Lawyers:

Our expert Litigation Advocates deal with both Commercial and Civil Disputes and Litigation including:

Property / Land disputes

Landlord and Tenant Disputes

Tenant Eviction

Assignments and Sub-Letting

Commercial Property Disputes

Residential Property Disputes

Our team is highly experienced in handling a wide range of disputes, providing practical and expert legal advice to our clients to resolve disputes quickly and cost-effectively.

We understand that Litigation can be a stressful experience, particularly when you are unsure about the costs and process involved. By understanding our client’s individual requirements, we are able to look after their interests to ensure that we provide the best possible legal advice. 

Real Estate Lawyers:

We assist clients in matters relating to land and property acquisitions, development of land parcels, Purchase of Villa, Apartment and Houses, Commercial Leasing, Conveyance and Registration including:

Property Title Verification

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Our Team of experienced Property Lawyers offer expert legal advice to our clients on all aspects of buying or selling of Property based on our deep knowledge and experience in Property Law. We keep the buyers interest at heart and not the interest of builders and brokers, we represent our clients in all transactions and make sure that our clients are well protected at every step of the transaction. We always aim at flawless contract and scrutinize every clause to remove any discrepancies and ensure safe transaction.

Family and Divorce Lawyers:

We appreciate that everyone’s relationships and circumstances are unique. We will listen to you and discuss the available options with you, providing legal support and practical guidance. We have extensive expertise in guiding our clients through the legal issues affecting their children following a separation. We understand the importance of minimizing distress to children and placing them at the center of all considerations. Our client-focused approach is built on getting to know our clients, their needs and their interests. By understanding our client’s individual requirements, we aim to minimise the stress of the end of a relationship and provide practical legal advice to achieve the best possible outcome.

The breakdown of a marriage is stressful for all involved, we offer practical advice to steer you through the divorce process, including advising on and negotiating financial settlements for our clients.

Corporate Lawyers:

One would assume the conflict won’t go nuclear, because that’s a patently absurd result for economically intertwined nations fighting over what amounts to an inconvenient sandbar, but experts feel a naval conflict isn’t out of the question with Chinese admirals hurling bellicose rhetoric already.

[multipleservicelisting]

Biden Rolls Back the Trump Legacy

In a grand ceremony at the Capitol building yesterday, the newly inaugurated President Biden promised to turn the page on an age of rancor, speaking from the same steps where just two weeks earlier a mob of the former president’s supporters had stormed Congress in a deadly attempt to overturn the election results.

“The will of the people has been heeded,” Biden said. “We’ve learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

Then Biden got to work. He signed 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations yesterday, swiftly reversing course on a number of Donald Trump’s signature moves. He halted construction of a wall along the Mexico border. He indicated that the United States would rejoin the Paris climate accord.

And he signed an order on environmental policy that begins to reverse a number of environmental policies enacted under the Trump administration, including revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

As he signed the orders, Biden framed them as a down payment on much larger-scale work to be done in the months ahead. That work, he said, would be responsive first and foremost to the Covid-19 crisis, but fundamentally focused on his broader mission to “rebuild the backbone of the country, the middle class. And so there’s going to be a lot of focus on that.”

The image of a masked Biden, sitting at the Oval Office desk and speaking in measured tones about his policy aims, offered a stark contrast to his predecessor — just as his inaugural plea for unity and reconciliation stood in contrast with the bellicose remarks Trump had given from the Capitol steps four years earlier, when he called for an end to the “American carnage” of the Obama years.

Like Biden, the Senate got busy immediately after the inauguration pageantry was over. The chamber officially changed hands yesterday, as the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff took their places as Georgia’s first Democratic senators in 16 years, and Alex Padilla assumed the seat vacated by Vice President Kamala Harris (who administered the oath to all three).

The arrival of these three new senators — and of Harris, as the chamber’s official president and 101st vote — represented the start of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.

In one of Senator Chuck Schumer’s first acts as majority leader, senators reached a deal to expedite Avril Haines’s confirmation as Biden’s director of national intelligence. The main holdup had come from Senator Tom Cotton, a close Trump ally, who made a point of making sure Haines went on the record saying she did not plan to reopen Obama-era investigations into the use of torture during the George W. Bush years.

With Haines’s confirmation, Biden avoids becoming the first president in recent memory to begin his term without at least some of his cabinet in place — but he’s still in the rare position of having to wait for his defense secretary and other national security officials to be confirmed.

On his way to the White House in 2016, Trump often promised to “drain the swamp” and unwind generations’ worth of political corruption. As president, of course, he upended ethics norms and demanded unflinching loyalty from his underlings, often putting them at risk of violating the law and inviting ethics questions.

On his way out of office yesterday, Trump released his final list of pardons, including a number of disgraced former public officials who had been convicted of charges related to political corruption. In all, Trump granted 73 pardons and 70 commutations in his final hours in office.

The full list made for a fitting end to his tenure. It included Randy Cunningham, known as Duke, a former member of Congress who kept a “bribe menu” on his congressional office stationery, and Kwame Kilpatrick, a former mayor of Detroit who was convicted of taking bribes, fixing municipal contracts and spending hundreds of thousands of public dollars on friends and family.

Trump also pardoned Steve Bannon, his 2016 campaign strategist and former White House adviser, who was facing trial on charges of cheating donors to a private group that was raising money for the Mexico border wall.

The biggest pardon he didn’t give was to himself. As he looks ahead to an impeachment trial in the Senate and possible civil and criminal litigation at both the state and federal levels, Trump did not issue himself a blanket pardon, which would have jeopardized his ability to draw upon his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

With the Republican Party in chaos, Trump’s legacy would appear to rest heavily in the hands of his online followers. His social media fan club helped propel him to the presidency as a populist insurgent in 2016, and followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory have been unwavering in their support for his baseless claims of election fraud.

On QAnon-affiliated online forums yesterday, theories had circulated that Biden would not succeed in assuming the presidency and that Trump would mount a last-minute coup to stay in power. Instead, many of his supporters were left deflated and dismayed by the relative normalcy of Biden’s inaugural ceremony. He has become president, and the world has not ended.

Members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group that has stood firmly by the president over the past four years, appear to have lost faith in their former hero. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys wrote in a Telegram channel earlier this week.

Still, with most Republicans continuing to say in polls that they think the election was rigged, it’s far from clear that the G.O.P. will be able to swiftly dispatch with Trumpism.

As Jeremy W. Peters writes in a new analysis, it remains an open question whether Trump’s disappearance from public office will mean a new day for Republican politics, or if too big a flock of Republican politicians has already committed to his reality-denying approach and can’t be turned back.

    Multiple Service Listing for Business Owners | Tools to Grow Your Local Business

www.MultipleServiceListing.com 

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[ericfruits]

Bad Advice Established Malpractice

An attorney's erroneous advice that a client could receive retroactive child support if she waited to establish the father's paternity formed the basis of a legal malpractice action.

The attorney had persisted in the bad advice even after an associate expressed the contrary view to the client. 

The Vermont Supreme Court reversed a trial court and concluded that the plaintiff established both causation and damages from the advice. 

After negotiations over support with the father broke down

Given the father’s attorney’s stance, defendant finally researched the law governing child support arrears to confirm her position. At this point, defendant discovered that she had provided incorrect advice to plaintiff regarding retroactive child support. Instead, in a letter to plaintiff acknowledging her error, defendant explained that no definitive law authorized arrears back to a child’s birth and the date of retroactivity was generally at the trial court’s discretion. In practice, moreover, “courts use the date of filing as opposed to the date of birth.” After receiving this letter, plaintiff told her mother’s friend, “This is devastating news . . . . I can hardly see straight [sic] I’m so angry and upset.”

Subsequently, in a letter to the father’s attorney, defendant acknowledged that her research revealed that she had been mistaken about the date of retroactivity. In the same letter, defendant also wrote: “Without a doubt, had the rules on retroactivity of support been more clear, [plaintiff] would have filed a parentage action as soon as [her daughter] was born.”

When the client sued 

the [lower] court determined that plaintiff failed to prove the negligent representation was a “cause-in-fact” of plaintiff’s injury and that the evidence was“equivocal” as to whether plaintiff would have decided to file immediately had she been aware of the risk. It also found insufficient evidence for nonspeculative monetary damages.

The court on causation

Our case law demonstrates that the court’s factual findings easily establish, by a preponderance of the evidence, that defendant’s negligent advice was the cause-in-fact of plaintiff’s injury...

Defendant’s arguments to the contrary are based on an alternative theory of causation and are not persuasive. She suggests that plaintiff would have delayed filing even if she had been given the correct advice. For example, defendant speculates that the father would have become belligerent if the parentage action had been filed immediately and claims that, because defendant’s advice avoided the possibility of a contentious custody battle, plaintiff would have delayed filing. This argument is not supported by the findings, which indicate that, when plaintiff communicated her pregnancy to the father, he expressed his desire to avoid interactions with both plaintiff and their child. The only indication of contentious behavior was the father’s tangential statement that litigation could turn his mother into a “mad dog”—a statement he made after the parentage action was filed and child custody had been settled. These findings show indifference, rather than bellicosity. Similarly, the trial court’s conclusion that plaintiff’s primary goal was custody of her child is not supported by the findings; at most, the findings demonstrate equal goals of custody and child support. Finally, defendant claims, and the court found, that her letter to the father’s attorney reflected a negotiating strategy, “not an admission directly establishing that [defendant] would have deviated from her advice to delay litigation.” This may have been defendant’s hidden intent, but the language of the letter plainly states that plaintiff would have filed had she been given correct advice. And this conclusion is sufficiently supported by the other factual findings described above.

And damages

Despite this clear causal link between defendant’s negligence and the damages suffered, the trial court relied on two faulty assumptions when it found that the alleged damages were speculative. First, the court stated that plaintiff submitted no evidence to support an award of $1875 per month from the date of her child’s birth; that is, the evidence did not establish that the monthly payment for the first fifteen months would have been the same child support amount that the father and plaintiff stipulated to after negotiations between their attorneys. Instead, the court noted that the father submitted two financial affidavits that resulted in two different child support calculations under Vermont’s child support guidelines. One of the affidavits considered the father’s family gift income, while the other did not. Either with the gift income or without the income, the father’s child support obligation calculated from the affidavits would have been less than $1875 per month. Because these amounts were lower than the stipulated amount and because the father could have contested the inclusion of gift income, the court concluded that the father’s income could not be determined in the absence of the stipulation and that, as a result, any award was speculative.

The court remanded for a calculation of damages.

Justice Carroll dissented

the trial court’s findings and the record as a whole support the conclusion that plaintiff failed to demonstrate that “but for” defendant’s negligence, she would have filed her parentage complaint sooner. The trial court’s application of a standard more deferential to plaintiff does not change, but supports, this result.

(Mike Frisch)

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[ecoorganic]

'The Most Intriguing Battle in NCAA History': As College Football Fragments, What Next?

The Big Ten and Pac-12 canceling their fall season has left college football officially divided—and not just among conferences.

At 9 a.m. on what would be an unprecedented day in college football’s baroque, bewildering and bellicose history, a text dropped in from a TV executive who was watching the tumult unfold:

“It’s athletic directors, coaches and players vs. presidents, trustees and lawyers in the most intriguing battle in NCAA history.”

It was the perfect summation of the underlying tension of this Summer of COVID-19.

At that point, nobody was sure who was going to win that epic confrontation. By the end of the day, it was a split decision. Presidents, trustees and lawyers scored two early victories in the Big Ten and Pac-12; athletic directors, coaches and players got an apparent late win in the Big 12.

The first two leagues formally

canceled fall sports, which means for the first time in the 124-year history of the Big Ten and 61-year history of Pac-12, no school in either league will play football. There were Big Ten football champions during World War I, the depths of the Depression and World War II. But there won’t be in 2020.

The Big 12, meanwhile, emerged from a league call Tuesday night saying that it will continue on a path toward playing in the fall. It was a less-than-total declaration, with one league source telling colleague Ross Dellenger: “This doesn’t mean we’re going to play. Students are coming back to campus.”

BARNHART: If ACC, Big 12 Also Bail, Would SEC Go It Alone?

Still, this was big news—and not just for those 10 Big 12 teams and their fans. It was a necessary threshold to reach for the Atlantic Coast and Southeastern conferences as well. If what had been described by sources as a “split” Big 12 stays the course, it means that a majority of the Power 5 is going forward—which was the assurance the ACC needed to stay in the fold.

So it is increasingly likely that college football will happen in the fall—diminished and divided though it will be. This is how it works for the oligarchy that runs the sport. There are alliances at times, but no true solidarity and no central leadership. The prevailing ethos: every rich league for itself. (And in this instance, find a few cardiologists who align their thoughts on COVID-19-related heart issues with what your league wants to do.)

But for those pressing forward to play, heed one warning: The lawyers will be circling. Not the ones counseling conferences to avoid trifling with players’ health, but the ones who will be doing the suing if, God forbid, a player dies, has long-term damage or career-threatening complications. In an email to Sports Illustrated, prominent college sports attorney Tom Mars offered this chilling view of what the Big 12, ACC and SEC could be getting into:

“Whatever conference(s) decides to play football this fall will be taking a ridiculously high risk they may soon regret. I know and have talked with some of the best plaintiff’s lawyers in the country this week, and they’re praying the SEC, Big 12 and/or the ACC are greedy enough to stay the course. If things go sideways, the plaintiff’s Bar will immediately get their hands on the internal financial analyses of the schools (a FOIA layup), get the conference financials through the discovery process, and then just stand in front of the jurors and point to the conferences that decided not to risk the health of their student-athletes. Good Lord, I’d hate to be the lawyers defending those cases.”

And the attorneys lining up to represent plaintiffs? “These are lawyers who’ve already slain bigger dragons than the SEC, and they can afford to finance the most expensive litigation on the planet. As a coalition, they’d be the legal equivalent of the Death Star.”

Sleep well, Big 12, ACC and SEC leaders.

Obviously, the fervent wish is for those who do play to suffer no ill effects. For those who don’t play, there is ample empathy.

It’s heartbreaking for all the Big Ten and Pac-12 athletes, in all the fall sports. It’s brutal for all the thousands of people whose jobs revolve around fall Saturdays in college towns like Ann Arbor and Champaign and Corvallis and Pullman. It’s a sad day for all of us who love college football.

It also could have been avoided, if the U.S. hadn’t blown off its collective responsibility to combat the COVID-19 scourge for much of the summer. The responsibility for that failure starts at the feckless, reckless top, but doesn’t end there. Before we get mad at our local university president or regional conference commissioner for taking away football, we should all grade our own virus film, to use a football term.

DELLENGER: Big 12 Keeps Hope of Fall Season Alive—for Now 

Currently, the score in the most intriguing battle in NCAA history is 2–0 in favor of those who have something bigger to worry about than whether their team wins on fall Saturdays. But back to the skirmish results from Tuesday: The university presidents, who are tasked with thinking about the greater good of an entire campus, did something they rarely do—they said no to big-time athletics. Did they want to? Of course not. It’s unpopular, and it exposes their athletic departments to massive financial hardship. But they made the hard, proper call in the midst of a pandemic that remains difficult to understand and harder to predict.

“There is simply too much unknown risk for us to proceed with the confidence we need to launch our sports seasons,” said Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez.

These decisions were made under considerable pressure, during a rare public showdown between the academic heads of major universities and their more famous (and often more popular) athletic subordinates. Sports fans are loud enough, but the noise in the system at the conference and university leadership level went up several decibels when the players themselves cranked up hashtag movements on social media, and then famous coaches chimed in, and then here came the politicians. When the president and vice president of the United States are both lobbying to play ball, that has to be considered.

The folks in athletics did their part to move the goalposts. Penn State coach James Franklin, in May: “I'm a believer in science. I'm a believer in medicine and listening to the experts.” James Franklin on Twitter this week, when it looked like the Big Ten’s scientists and doctors and experts were favoring postponement: “I love our players & believe it is my responsibility to help them chase their dreams, both collectively & individually. I am willing to fight WITH them & for our program!”

What had been a swift Big Ten progression toward a decision was slowed in the final hours. What had been considered a formality took on a tinge of drama. Would the league really tell a grandstanding Ryan Day, an angry Jim Harbaugh and a forceful Franklin to hang up their whistles until spring?

Yes it would, as led by a rookie commissioner. Kevin Warren, leading the Big Ten, stood in what looked like a collapsing pocket and delivered an accurate (if unpopular) decision. "This is a very, very trying time,” he said Tuesday. “It’s one of those days you hope in your career you don't have to deal with. But that's not the case in life—we have to deal with what's in front of us.”

For so long throughout this staggering journey toward kickoff, college football’s leadership has been embarrassingly weak. The NCAA and president Mark Emmert are virtually absent. Conferences have been fickle and slow, waiting for someone else to lead. It’s gotten so bad that one FBS athletic director stood in front of his football team Monday and apologized for the terrible leadership in college sports. “You deserve better,” he told them.

The collateral damage during all this dithering has been the athletes themselves, left twisting for weeks while trying to maintain focus on workouts for a season that may not arrive. Now that decisions are being made, universities owe them rapid answers on two fronts:

If your team is playing, what will the testing protocols and other safeguards be throughout the season?

If your team is not playing, what will the school do to support you in terms of scholarship, eligibility, access to facilities and mental health?

The split in college football is a microcosm of the split in our society, and much of it falls along the same lines. As a colleague said, a Venn diagram of those angry about canceled football seasons and those angry about wearing masks might be one circle. It’s exhausting—and also not over.

The SEC, ACC and Big 12, along with, potentially, the American Athletic, Conference USA and Sun Belt, still have to get to kickoff. There likely are many more skirmishes ahead in the battle of athletic directors, coaches and players vs. presidents, trustees and lawyers.

Read more of SI's Daily Covers stories here

More From NCAA Coverage From SI.com Sites:

Ohio State Players' Twitter Reaction to Big Ten's Decision ASU's Herm Edwards Talks Pac-12 Football Cancellation Iowa's Ferentz Delivers the News on the Loss of a Season January Football Games Are Nothing New to UW—Just Husky Stadium What Would a Spring College Football Season Look Like?

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[elizabethleslie7654]

A Suicide Pact, Unless You Can Avoid It

all kinds of cool jewelry and no shipping or getting mobbed t the mall

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America’s mobile Constitutional crisis is marching steadily up from Central America. The 2018 migrant caravan is nothing more than a symbol of the real crisis, but it does force MAGA voters to face the immigration disaster that has been going on for decades thanks to the generally permissive attitude of the Left and Right to illegal and legal immigration, respectively. Immigration is itself only the most graphic example of the atrophy of America’s Constitutional order, but the contrast between southern California and southern Indiana has become so undeniable that the 2016 election was a re-litigation of globalist policies the Left thought had been universally accepted in the 1990’s. If the Left had bided their time they could have weathered even 8 years of Trump without too much damage to their cause, but on guns and immigration they are treating America as if it were one big college campus where the SJW mentality reigns supreme. As a result the Trump Presidency may soon change from being a thorn in the side of the administrative state and take on an overtly revolutionary character.

A revolutionary presidency does not consist of arresting foreigner invaders or deploying the military to the border, though the Left will treat such minor procedural acts as harbingers of totalitarianism. Trump’s real revolutionary act is refusing to accept the banana republic status ordained for the United States by globalists. The one great task of this presidency, at which Trump’s success is by no means guaranteed, is to make the federal government function in the interest of the citizens of the historic American nation according to written laws rather than the whims of the Leftist bureaucracy and culture. The Constitution has many problems, but at this point merely getting back to our flawed governing document would be a major achievement.

It is easy to blame the ambiguities and omissions of the Constitution for many of our current problems, but before we can improve the Constitution we must undo the multigenerational shift of power into unwritten agreements among the ruling class. Many new circumstances have been successfully incorporated into the American system, not without violence to the Constitution or the spirit of the founding principles of the country, though we used to at least go through the trouble of amending the Constitution. Politicians now generally leave the official documents alone and work through the federal courts, as they did in the nakedly talmudic Obamacare Supreme Court case. Welfare programs, war-making, and the budget are all run on a haphazard basis. The institutional aspects of America’s decline have largely been kept out of the public eye, but a migrant caravan is just the kind of attention grabbing event needed to expose the contradictions inherent in the modern American system that are obscured in civilian life.

Consider the scope of Clown World’s inanity. A group of foreigners are marching into sovereign territory illegally. The commander-in-chief cannot build a defensive barrier without Congressional approval, though Congress has approved border funding in the past that was never implemented. The National Guard has been unavailable to guard our nation for the past decade and a half because it has been away (unsuccessfully) guarding Afghanistan and Iraq from the Afghan and Iraqi people. Meanwhile, the most populous border state in the U.S. is already half filled by the relatives of the current invading migrants. If state governors do call up the Guard, Leftist activists and lawyers are ready to bring human rights suits, environmental impact reports, and any other frivolous case that will prevent the effective use of the troops. If the governors do not call up the Guard and Trump tries to overrule them, Libertarians will complain about the destruction of liberty, federalism, and small government. If any troops are deployed, all the migrants need is a screen of women and children at the front and a bevy of religious conservatives will argue against any use of force to stop them.

The commander-in-chief is not supposed to use the military to defend the United States. We have, you see, a long tradition of prohibiting domestic law enforcement by the military, which, while admirable, might be more enduring if we did not simultaneously invite our enemies to settle in our territory. If Trump attempts to deploy troops on the Mexican side of the border, Congress would suddenly and uncharacteristically assert their power to declare war—or not. The southern border is not like the laundry list of nations where American troops have deployed at mere hints of unrest. The massive Pentagon budget and militarized police forces are useless when the threat is actually at our own doorstep. The best we can do, assuming the cooperation of the states, is wait for the invaders to break in, arrest them, release most into the U.S.A. with legal status, deport a few, and imprison the rest at taxpayer expense. Even when America ‘wins,’ the American people lose.

The response to the migrant caravan will show just how close to catastrophic failure the American system really is. There have been many premature announcements of America’s collapse, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If columns of invaders do ever just walk right in from Mexico, at that point all bets will be off concerning the function of American government and law enforcement. But social systems do not just give up and die for no reason, and even the most cowardly politicians have a sense of self-preservation. Most congressmen, whatever their opinions on immigration, intuitively understand that they cannot allow a marching caravan to overtly flout U.S. law the way African migrants did in Europe. The migrants sense this too, and seem to be cleverly dividing up to make Trump’s National Guard deployment look like a bellicose overreaction to a minor problem.

There are probably still enough functioning American institutions to ensure that some kind of border security will meet these migrants. But the deeply ingrained political correctness of the military makes it unlikely that the National Guard will be opening fire on illegal border crossers. Mass detentions and incarceration are stopgap measures that can only delay America’s demographic transformation, unless Trump uses this crisis to transfer all immigration cases out of the American courts and into some sort of military tribunal system. This is also a perfect opportunity for Trump to push for aggressive measures against sanctuary cities and states that impede law enforcement. It is time for Trump to openly advocate for the White majority. Every avenue of communication open to the president should be used to counteract the media narrative on immigration and remind voters that Europeans have greater demographic and cultural connections to the United States than Mexicans do. Trump needs to take one step beyond the civic nationalist rhetoric of the GOP and adopt the talking points of Tucker Carlson and Steve King, otherwise the National Guard will have no more sense of purpose than any other government agency that needs to make sure paperwork is filled out correctly. If Trump seizes this opportunity to re-establish rule of law he will have an enduring, revolutionary legacy. Anything less and his presidency will be remembered as a marginally effective historical curiosity.

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MY FAVORITE ACCESSORIES

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[spectaculardistractions]

I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek. In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those under her protection–say a child or a husband–she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as is commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and without qualms.

H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

[ecoorganic]

'The Most Intriguing Battle in NCAA History': As College Football Fragments, What Next?

The Big Ten and Pac-12 canceling their fall season has left college football officially divided—and not just among conferences.

At 9 a.m. on what would be an unprecedented day in college football’s baroque, bewildering and bellicose history, a text dropped in from a TV executive who was watching the tumult unfold:

“It’s athletic directors, coaches and players vs. presidents, trustees and lawyers in the most intriguing battle in NCAA history.”

It was the perfect summation of the underlying tension of this Summer of COVID-19.

At that point, nobody was sure who was going to win that epic confrontation. By the end of the day, it was a split decision. Presidents, trustees and lawyers scored two early victories in the Big Ten and Pac-12; athletic directors, coaches and players got an apparent late win in the Big 12.

The first two leagues formally

canceled fall sports, which means for the first time in the 124-year history of the Big Ten and 61-year history of Pac-12, no school in either league will play football. There were Big Ten football champions during World War I, the depths of the Depression and World War II. But there won’t be in 2020.

The Big 12, meanwhile, emerged from a league call Tuesday night saying that it will continue on a path toward playing in the fall. It was a less-than-total declaration, with one league source telling colleague Ross Dellenger: “This doesn’t mean we’re going to play. Students are coming back to campus.”

BARNHART: If ACC, Big 12 Also Bail, Would SEC Go It Alone?

Still, this was big news—and not just for those 10 Big 12 teams and their fans. It was a necessary threshold to reach for the Atlantic Coast and Southeastern conferences as well. If what had been described by sources as a “split” Big 12 stays the course, it means that a majority of the Power 5 is going forward—which was the assurance the ACC needed to stay in the fold.

So it is increasingly likely that college football will happen in the fall—diminished and divided though it will be. This is how it works for the oligarchy that runs the sport. There are alliances at times, but no true solidarity and no central leadership. The prevailing ethos: every rich league for itself. (And in this instance, find a few cardiologists who align their thoughts on COVID-19-related heart issues with what your league wants to do.)

But for those pressing forward to play, heed one warning: The lawyers will be circling. Not the ones counseling conferences to avoid trifling with players’ health, but the ones who will be doing the suing if, God forbid, a player dies, has long-term damage or career-threatening complications. In an email to Sports Illustrated, prominent college sports attorney Tom Mars offered this chilling view of what the Big 12, ACC and SEC could be getting into:

“Whatever conference(s) decides to play football this fall will be taking a ridiculously high risk they may soon regret. I know and have talked with some of the best plaintiff’s lawyers in the country this week, and they’re praying the SEC, Big 12 and/or the ACC are greedy enough to stay the course. If things go sideways, the plaintiff’s Bar will immediately get their hands on the internal financial analyses of the schools (a FOIA layup), get the conference financials through the discovery process, and then just stand in front of the jurors and point to the conferences that decided not to risk the health of their student-athletes. Good Lord, I’d hate to be the lawyers defending those cases.”

And the attorneys lining up to represent plaintiffs? “These are lawyers who’ve already slain bigger dragons than the SEC, and they can afford to finance the most expensive litigation on the planet. As a coalition, they’d be the legal equivalent of the Death Star.”

Sleep well, Big 12, ACC and SEC leaders.

Obviously, the fervent wish is for those who do play to suffer no ill effects. For those who don’t play, there is ample empathy.

It’s heartbreaking for all the Big Ten and Pac-12 athletes, in all the fall sports. It’s brutal for all the thousands of people whose jobs revolve around fall Saturdays in college towns like Ann Arbor and Champaign and Corvallis and Pullman. It’s a sad day for all of us who love college football.

It also could have been avoided, if the U.S. hadn’t blown off its collective responsibility to combat the COVID-19 scourge for much of the summer. The responsibility for that failure starts at the feckless, reckless top, but doesn’t end there. Before we get mad at our local university president or regional conference commissioner for taking away football, we should all grade our own virus film, to use a football term.

DELLENGER: Big 12 Keeps Hope of Fall Season Alive—for Now 

Currently, the score in the most intriguing battle in NCAA history is 2–0 in favor of those who have something bigger to worry about than whether their team wins on fall Saturdays. But back to the skirmish results from Tuesday: The university presidents, who are tasked with thinking about the greater good of an entire campus, did something they rarely do—they said no to big-time athletics. Did they want to? Of course not. It’s unpopular, and it exposes their athletic departments to massive financial hardship. But they made the hard, proper call in the midst of a pandemic that remains difficult to understand and harder to predict.

“There is simply too much unknown risk for us to proceed with the confidence we need to launch our sports seasons,” said Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez.

These decisions were made under considerable pressure, during a rare public showdown between the academic heads of major universities and their more famous (and often more popular) athletic subordinates. Sports fans are loud enough, but the noise in the system at the conference and university leadership level went up several decibels when the players themselves cranked up hashtag movements on social media, and then famous coaches chimed in, and then here came the politicians. When the president and vice president of the United States are both lobbying to play ball, that has to be considered.

The folks in athletics did their part to move the goalposts. Penn State coach James Franklin, in May: “I'm a believer in science. I'm a believer in medicine and listening to the experts.” James Franklin on Twitter this week, when it looked like the Big Ten’s scientists and doctors and experts were favoring postponement: “I love our players & believe it is my responsibility to help them chase their dreams, both collectively & individually. I am willing to fight WITH them & for our program!”

What had been a swift Big Ten progression toward a decision was slowed in the final hours. What had been considered a formality took on a tinge of drama. Would the league really tell a grandstanding Ryan Day, an angry Jim Harbaugh and a forceful Franklin to hang up their whistles until spring?

Yes it would, as led by a rookie commissioner. Kevin Warren, leading the Big Ten, stood in what looked like a collapsing pocket and delivered an accurate (if unpopular) decision. "This is a very, very trying time,” he said Tuesday. “It’s one of those days you hope in your career you don't have to deal with. But that's not the case in life—we have to deal with what's in front of us.”

For so long throughout this staggering journey toward kickoff, college football’s leadership has been embarrassingly weak. The NCAA and president Mark Emmert are virtually absent. Conferences have been fickle and slow, waiting for someone else to lead. It’s gotten so bad that one FBS athletic director stood in front of his football team Monday and apologized for the terrible leadership in college sports. “You deserve better,” he told them.

The collateral damage during all this dithering has been the athletes themselves, left twisting for weeks while trying to maintain focus on workouts for a season that may not arrive. Now that decisions are being made, universities owe them rapid answers on two fronts:

If your team is playing, what will the testing protocols and other safeguards be throughout the season?

If your team is not playing, what will the school do to support you in terms of scholarship, eligibility, access to facilities and mental health?

The split in college football is a microcosm of the split in our society, and much of it falls along the same lines. As a colleague said, a Venn diagram of those angry about canceled football seasons and those angry about wearing masks might be one circle. It’s exhausting—and also not over.

The SEC, ACC and Big 12, along with, potentially, the American Athletic, Conference USA and Sun Belt, still have to get to kickoff. There likely are many more skirmishes ahead in the battle of athletic directors, coaches and players vs. presidents, trustees and lawyers.

Read more of SI's Daily Covers stories here

More From NCAA Coverage From SI.com Sites:

Ohio State Players' Twitter Reaction to Big Ten's Decision ASU's Herm Edwards Talks Pac-12 Football Cancellation Iowa's Ferentz Delivers the News on the Loss of a Season January Football Games Are Nothing New to UW—Just Husky Stadium What Would a Spring College Football Season Look Like?

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