Katie Zacharia, we hardly knew ye: on being a lawyer

The New Neo Posted on by

Katie Zacharia seems to have set a record for shortness of stay in the press secretary role. It’s probably one of the most pressured and stressful jobs in government, and she simply was not up to the task:

Zacharia held her first brief press briefing on Tuesday, just one day after she started the job, and came under scrutiny after she had represented herself as a lawyer but acknowledged this week that she did not pass her bar exam following law school.

Zacharia’s first White House press briefing lasted less than 15 minutes, during which she took only a few questions from reporters and couldn’t answer one about whether the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

It’s that part about being a lawyer that interests me – for personal reasons. I, too, am a law school graduate but not a lawyer. The Zacharia flap brought back a ton of memories, few of them good.

Why did I even go to law school? The main reasons were threefold: I was aimless and undirected even in my senior year of college, my father was a lawyer (a real one), and I took the LSAT test and did very very well indeed. That last bit told me I could pretty much write my ticket to any law school in the land, and so I did and was admitted to an elite law school. I had mild dreams of Clarence Darrow-like defense and eloquence in my head, dreams of which I was disabused rather quickly – in fact, my very first day of class.

I was forced to confront the fact that I was very shy and hated being put on the spot in front of a crowd. Yes, I should have thought of that to begin with, but somehow I hadn’t. During my second year, I spoke to a professor who had been assigned to me as an advisor, and said I wanted to quit. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to any advisor there; although nowadays they have plenty of them, back then you were pretty much on your own. He talked me into staying by pointing out that I still didn’t know what else I should do, and that at the time I was in the middle of my second year. Only one and a half years to go and I’d have a law degree. So why not stay?

You might answer: “money.” Didn’t law school, especially an elite one, cost an absolute ton of money? These days it certainly does; according to Google AI:

According to recent data compiled via U.S. News Best Law School Rankings and Above the Law, annual tuition and fee rates for top-tier private programs include:

– Columbia University: $88,390 per year
– New York University (NYU): $87,214 per year
– University of Chicago: $84,906 per year
– University of Pennsylvania (Carey): $84,492 per year
– Duke University: $81,829 per year
– Northwestern University (Pritzker): $80,583 per year
– Stanford University: $79,707 per year
– Yale University: $78,961 per year
– Harvard University: $78,692 per year

Total 3-Year J.D. Cost Estimates

– Tuition and Fees (3 Years): A standard three-year Juris Doctor (J.D.) program totals roughly $230,000 to $265,000 in tuition alone.
– Full Cost of Attendance (3 Years): When adding rent, meals, health insurance, and books, the complete 3-year price tag often scales between $330,000 and $390,000+.

That’s sobering. But it’s nothing like when I went to law school. My tuition was $2K a year, which in present-day dollars would be about $18K. Not the least bit comparable to today’s tuition. What’s more, my rent was $65 a month. So it was not that much of a hardship for me or my family, unlike today.

Back then, also, I was told – although I don’t know where this statistic came from or whether it was correct – that about half of the graduates from elite law schools never practiced law. Nowadays, the percentage is smaller, but nevertheless sizeable percentages leave.

To be blunt, I found law to be very very very boring, except for certain pockets that were interesting. Might I have found work within those pockets? The main one was jurisprudence, or philosophy of law, and the only job that might lead to was to be a law professor. I had neither the grades, nor the inclination – nor, to be frank, the sex chromosomes (law professors were male in those days) – for that job. Now, strangely enough, jurisprudence is a topic I do explore with some regularity on the blog.

So does it all work out in the end?

More on the Ilhan Omar investigation

The New Neo Posted on by

It gallops apace. What will come of it, nobody knows.

But here’s the latest:

We’ve reported that at least two investigations are ongoing: one involving immigration questions and another involving financial disclosures. Now there are new reports that what’s being looked into may be even broader than people generally believe. NewsNation’s Leland Vittert claimed that the raid on Omar’s home was just the most conspicuous of more than a dozen raids. He also reported that federal agents allegedly went dumpster diving in Omar’s trash for DNA and that “likely coming indictments will be stunning in nature,” according to his sources.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Her sister is being investigated as well:

Meanwhile, Omar’s older sister, Sahra Noor, who is supposed to be on a tour promoting her book about her life as a Somali immigrant, was scheduled to be at a book tour stop at the University of Minnesota Rochester on Thursday night.

Except, according to reports, she skipped the event due to a “family emergency,” amid all the action going on. Noor has allegedly been subpoenaed in the investigation.

Now there is a report from the New York Times that the sister’s phone was seized before the raid on Omar’s home.

I have little doubt there’s something – or probably many things – crooked in Ilhan Omar’s presentation. Whether she will be prosecuted for it (or them) is another question entirely. Omar has been immune from serious consequences for a long time, mostly because she can play the race card and the discrimination card any time she wants, and has done so very successfully for many years.

SSRIs and violence

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: In yesterday’s thread on the school shooting in Bend, I noticed that the topic of SSRIs and violence came up. So I think it makes sense to repeat the following post, which I wrote in 2023.]

Every time there’s a school shooting or any sort of mass violence, the subject of SSRIs comes up from one commenter or another.

Sometimes people also bring up the subject of fatherlessness and mass shooters, which I wrote about at length in this post, the gist of which is that there is no connection although it’s popularly thought that there is.

Now, on to SSRIs. It is notoriously difficult to do research on whether SSRIs trigger more violence, have no effect, or help prevent violence, and if so in what populations. It’s a popular internet meme that they trigger violence, but the evidence is not at all clear that that is so, and as I said it’s very difficult to design a good study. One obvious reason is that such people are often at higher risk for violence in the first place, and drugs are not given randomly. There is almost certainly something already different about the people who get them and those who don’t.

This is one of the better-designed studies, and as you can see if you read it it’s very hard to tell what it all means, if anything. For example:

As is often the case, the authors of the study themselves are rather cautious. While obviously concerned that it is possible that SSRIs may actually cause violent behavior in a small minority of people, they fully recognize that other explanations are possible. These include the possibility that what is driving the violent behavior is medication undertreatment, based on the finding that the risk with violence was only found among individuals who were likely taking subtherapeutic doses. As reported by MedScape, one of the study authors, Seena Fazel, states: “Our own view is that some evidence suggests that it’s a bit more complicated than that, because we found a link with subtherapeutic doses of SSRIs, and that would suggest to us that it may be that it’s actually a lack of treatment [and] it could be residual symptoms that are driving this link.” At the same time, if antidepressants really worked wonders for young people, we should see that therapeutic SSRI usage was associated with a reduced risk of violent behavior, which it wasn’t.

A couple other factors also deserve mention. The idea of comparing periods on and off medication within the same individual is a clever design, because many individual factors that might be related to risk of violence, like one’s socioeconomic status or DNA, are held constant. However, because the period of medication use was not randomized (and couldn’t be), it introduces the very likely complicating issue that individuals were taking medications during times when they were feeling more depressed, anxious, and angry to start with, and thus at higher risk of acting violently. Finally, it is important to note that a statistically significant association certainly does not mean that most people taking antidepressants are out there hurting others. When taking SSRI medications, the conviction rate of violent crimes was at a 1.0% rate compared to 0.6% without medications.

There’s also this:

Our study encompassed nationwide data over a 15-year period. In this period, the homicide rate per 100,000 remained fairly constant, with a moderate decline in recent years, leading to an average of 160 homicide victims per year. The suicide rate decreased steadily from 10.26 (approximately 1,500 victims) in 1994 to 8.77 (approximately 1,400 victims) per 100,000 in 2008. The homicide–suicide rate remained relatively stable, averaging at 0.05 per 100,000 (varying from 4 to 14 victims per year, see Fig. 1). In the same period, the rate of total antidepressant use increased considerably, from 3,038.81 in 1994 to 5,650.58 per 100,000 in 2008. A similar increase was observed for the rate of SSRI use alone, which more than doubled from 1,482.25 in 1994 to 3,161.15 per 100,000 in 2008 as well as the rate of SSRI use including venlafaxine, with an increase of 1,486.81 in 1994 to 3,904.20 per 100,000 in 2008. Over the same period, the number of defined daily doses used rose from 59.6 million in 1994 to 245.3 million in 2008: a fourfold increase. This indicates that not only more people used antidepressants, but also that the mean duration or intensity of the treatment grew…

Rates of the use of SSRIs including venlafaxine were also found to be negatively associated with both homicide rates and suicide rates. No significant independent association was found between rates of SSRIs including venlafaxine and homicide–suicide.

Here’s an article about suicide and SSRIs for young people:

The 2004 study examined the clinical trial data that had been collected on two types of medications, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI). The results of the study prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a black box warning, the most serious level of warning in prescription drug labeling, for the risk of suicides in children and adolescents being treated with antidepressants in 2004. The warning was extended to young adults ages 18 to 25 years in 2006.

The researchers in the current study performed a meta-analysis of 41 studies, reviewing the data on a total of 9,185 youths, adults, and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine (Prozac is one common brand) and venlafaxine (Effexor) immediate (IR) and extended release (ER) preparations…

In all three age groups, treatment with fluoxetine and with venlafaxine IR and ER resulted in a statistically significant improvement in depressive symptoms when compared to treatment with placebo. The decline in depressive symptoms was also faster for patients treated with medication than control group patients. In the adult and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine or venlafaxine, suicidal thoughts and behaviors decreased over time.

As the patients became less depressed, they had fewer suicidal thoughts and attempts. Although the youths who were treated with medication showed the same statistically significant decrease in depressive symptoms as the older populations, they did not show a decrease in suicidal ideation and actions.

“In kids, we don’t see a harmful effect, but we do see a disassociation between the beneficial effects on depression and the potential beneficial effect on suicide,” said the study’s lead author…

The newest analysis did not support the idea that there was an increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents taking fluoxetine, an SSRI. In explaining the difference in their findings, the researchers note that these original meta-analyses included fewer studies and the studies were of shorter term than the longitudinal data they analyzed.

There probably will be a number of readers here who say something like this: “It’s all lies promulgated to cover up the damage drug companies do and to preserve their profits.” You’re welcome to that point of view, and certainly during the COVID years the CDC and many other official entities have earned our distrust. But if you throw out all research, including older studies such as these, you are left with internet memes and paranoia. That’s not science, either. I believe that most of these studies are attempts at valid research on a subject that is inherently difficult to study, and that the bulk of the evidence indicates that SSRIs do not increase violent behavior.

School shooting in Bend, Oregon

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been another horrific school shooting, with three young children and a teacher dead. The killer shot his way into a locked area, but was ultimately stopped by the armed father of a student, who saw him enter and followed him in.

The killer was 16-year-old John J. Griffin, who had once attended the school:

John J. Griffin II, 16, was armed with his mom’s pump-action shotgun when he opened fire inside Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend – killing three kids, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher, law enforcement sources said.

The shooter also critically injured another student, 7, and teacher, 54, before a brave bystander and dad of two little girls at the school shot him dead — before police even arrived at the scene. …

The killer’s parents are cooperating with authorities, who executed a search warrant on the family’s home, taking computers and other electronic devices to sift through for possible clues to a motive behind the carnage, sources told The Post.

If the parents left the shotgun loaded and unlocked, they could be in trouble themselves. Of course, they are also dealing with the fact that their own child was a killer, and is now dead.

The armed bystander who shot the perpetrator was Kaylub Giamanco (I think “Kaylub” is an eccentric spelling of “Caleb”):

… a carpenter and father of two girls who attend Silver Rail Elementary, [who] was driving home from his break on Thursday when he heard gunfire, his brother, Kyle Giamanco, told NBC News.

Kaylub Giamanco, 36, who owns a concealed weapon, bravely pursued teen gunman John J. Griffin II into the school building’s special education room and fatally shot him, his brother described.

There’s a great deal of discussion online about restrictive gun laws in Oregon and the fact that the school was a no-gun zone. But I don’t actually think Giamanco will get into trouble in this instance, although one can’t be sure (it’s Oregon, after all).

The case illustrates, among other things, the fact that locks on doors don’t deter shootings. Locks and/or windows near or in locked doors have been shot out before; I’m thinking, for example, of the Sandy Hook shooter who was not stopped by locks.

RIP to the victims.

NOTE: I will add that I know Bend, Oregon, very well. It’s a town in the heart of what’s known as the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway, or U.S. Route 97. I’ve traveled on it many a time with Gerard, and we stayed in Bend many times as well. It’s a beautiful although touristy town in a fascinating setting for those of us who are interested in volcanos. I am one of those people.

Obama goes to Belfast and reveals himself

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, it’s not as though his anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sympathies were previously unknown. But now that such attitudes have become the norm – even the required norm – among Democrats, Obama can be more open about it:

According to Irish media, Obama – speaking about the Israel-Palestinian conflict at an event in Belfast – said it was “undeniable” that Jews who settled in Palestine to escape persecution “took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’”

Read those words again, and consider who spoke them. The problem is not merely that Obama said it. It is that countless people will believe it precisely because Obama said it.

This was not some 5th grader history student speaking. This was a two-term president of the United States, a man who remains one of the most influential figures on the planet …

His influence is actually less now than when he was president, but he still is respected by many. However, I doubt his saying this persuaded those who were previously unpersuaded; Obama is very much preaching to the choir and what he said is now a standard belief among Democrats (and many people on the right, as well). Many are ignorant of history, but is Obama? Does it even matter?:

In one fell swoop, Obama, either knowingly or through astonishing ignorance, peddled one of the most pernicious myths about Jews and Zionism – a myth which perhaps more than any other has been responsible for a century of conflict, tens of thousands of Jews killed, and many more times that of Arabs. All because of this false claim that the Jews stole the land.

If this is what Obama truly believes, then, in my view, he is an antisemitism superspreader

And if he says it without believing it, then he is even worse – a knowing, evil antisemitism superspreader.

More:

It is not “undeniable” that Jews “took land off people”. It is, in fact, very deniable, because it is quite simply untrue. You do not need to be a professor of Middle Eastern history to understand that the Jewish people have maintained a connection with the Land of Israel for more than 3,000 years. We are not strangers who have appeared here out of nowhere. Jews who more recently settled in waves of aliyah did not steal the land, as you inferred, but bought it legally from Arabs, even paying exorbitant prices. Don’t take my word for it – you can check for yourself in Ottoman and British documents.

And what exactly was it “excessive” that, according to you, the Jews did? Flee from gas chambers? Were my own parents “excessive” when they escaped to Palestine in 1932 because Hitler was round the corner? They bought their own home, by the way.

“Excessive” is just one of the words du jour about Israel. I doubt Obama sits around thinking about the details of that “excessiveness.” It is like the word “disproportionate” to discuss the war; people use the word without even knowing what it means in terms of a war.

You can read a deeper analysis of Obama’s remarks here.

I am heartily sick of this man, who has done so much damage to the nation and the world and who became president based on a masquerade about his intentions, which were always far more leftist and transformative than he initially let on. Yes, he spoke of “hope and change” – but he didn’t specify what the change would be. He just let his sonorous voice do the talking and let the listeners fill in the blanks with whatever they imagined to be his goals.

And he knows it. He’s long known it and used it: “In the prologue to the second of his autobiographies, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama said: ‘I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.'”

NOTE: By the way, Belfast is in Northern Ireland, not Ireland proper. Ireland itself is probably the most anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and pro-Palestinian country in Europe – which is saying a lot. Northern Ireland is more mixed.

If you want to hear about what’s going on in Ireland vis a vis Israel, watch some of this:

We have become too dependent on computers for just about everything

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s seemed that way for quite some time. Years ago, I remember going to a supermarket when its computers were down. Things pretty much came to a standstill. Among other things, the cashiers didn’t know how to do basic math.

Now we have this:

Hackers targeted hundreds of French supermarkets in a cyberattack that reportedly caused refrigerators and freezers to overheat, spoiling food and sparking fires.

Fridges at French supermarket chains Carrefour, Monoprix, the Les Mousquetaires-owned Intermarché, and Coopérative U, among others, all saw fridges heat up to as much as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight, Reuters reported Monday.

Coopérative U’s CEO, Dominique Schelcher, confirmed that cyberattacks had affected “refrigeration production facilities of several stores.”

“Attacking equipment that is essential to the preservation of fresh products and the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and unprecedented. It is unacceptable,” Schelcher said in a LinkedIn post.

I love that word “unacceptable.” Just what are you going to do about it, Schelcher?

What is the motivation of a hacker? For some, it could just be the fun of “watching the world burn”:

For others, it’s a political statement much like Luigi Mangione’s deciding to kill the United Healthcare CEO. I think the common denominator is the attraction of having power at a distance, and I don’t just mean electricity. I mean power over a large swath of things, just because you figured out how to hack into a system and control it. Prior to computers, I don’t think there was any way to do this on a large scale.

The great flatware reunion

The New Neo Posted on by

I spent several hours today getting rid of things in my ex’s place. That simple statement doesn’t even begin to express what it feels like to do this. My ex was very sentimental about things and nostalgic about time, and he saved almost everything. I knew that, if he predeceased me, I’d have to be part of the dismantling of his precious things (only a few actually worth anything in dollars, but all of which meant a great great deal to him).

It feels like a betrayal, although I know it’s not.

But I thought our son would be more involved. Although he tried to be – he came here for a week – he came down with the flu and was very sick the whole time he was here. One other family member came for a few hours. And next week my brother and sister-in-law will come for two days. I’m grateful for any help at all, but this is such a huge task that I would need a lot more help than that to even make a dent in it.

I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve hired a friend who does this for a living. But there’s only so much she can do, and she can’t go through papers. Only I can do that, and the amount of paper is overwhelming. Boxes and boxes, shelves and shelves, and many suitcases full. I started today on the paper and got an immediate headache. I’m not going through each piece, but even a general perusal takes time.

I found, for example, a cache of my credit cards from the 1980s. Old medical records from the 1950s. The blueprints for the house we bought as a married couple, which was built in the 1930s. And on and on and on.

But one thing that made me happy was opening a drawer and seeing the flatware. I knew it was there, of course. When we separated about twenty-five years ago, we divided the flatware into two halves and each got six place settings. It was beautiful, heavy flatware (we never got silver) and I always loved it. And now – opening that drawer made me gasp, because I realized the set would be together again.

And so it is. It seems symbolic to me. Our divorce was always a sorrowful thing, necessary but tragic. Suffice to say I never stopped loving my ex-husband, although the love changed.

NOTE: The flatware, in case you’re interested, is called Lauffer Magnum and it was made in Norway. Later it got taken over by other companies and an inferior version was made. Google AI has this to say:

Lauffer Magnum is an original mid-century modern stainless steel pattern designed with a satin finish.

Key Details

• Material and Finish: 18/8 stainless steel with a sleek satin finish.
• Design Style: Bold, minimalist mid-century modern aesthetic.
• Collector Sentiment: Most users on Reddit agree that the original Norwegian-made sets are more desirable and higher quality compared to later or alternative regional productions (such as those from Japan or Korea).

It’s not really about the flatware, though. Not at all.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I think this is the right decision:

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the execution of the terrorist-traitor Army Maj. Nidal Hasan will not be live-streamed. Trump’s order overrides Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s earlier decision to make the death-by-firing-squad viewable by the public.

I already weighed in on the idea of livestreaming the execution, in this post. I was not in favor.

(2) It seems it’s okay to say abusive and racist things about white people, and of course about Jews. I hear it all the time, especially about white people – and often said by white people. Apparently these virtue-signalers feel they’ll get extra virtue points from trashing themselves.

(3) Democrats apparently don’t want Kamala Harris as their candidate in 2028. But did they ever want her as their candidate? She certainly didn’t do well in the 2020 primaries. And in 2024 she was foisted on the party after it was caught in a Biden dilemma of its own making. The amazing thing is that she came as close to winning as she did. Most Democrats and Trump-haters either held their noses and voted for her, or thought she was perfectly okay. The latter group contained many people who didn’t watch her interviews.

(4) Banks discriminated against conservatives. No surprise there:

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its Debanking Review on Wednesday. Miranda Devine first broke the story in the New York Post. The 47-page report, titled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” draws on a hundred thousand complaints and fifty thousand internal bank records from 2020 through 2025. It names JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO Bank.

Every one of them hid behind the same excuse: “reputation risk.”

What did these banks fear? Bad press, protests, attacks from activist outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and retaliation from regulators and politicians. So they purged anyone who might draw that heat. Christian organizations lost service over their views on abortion, LGBT issues, and traditional family values. Gun makers and retailers, Arctic oil and gas, coal, detention facilities, tobacco, and e-cigarette companies all saw financing dry up.

And it will happen again if Democrats regain control.

(5) Democrats talk about affordability but won’t be delivering it. Anyone who’s been paying attention should know that. But a great many people don’t pay attention. “Affordability” is therefore a smart campaign strategy.

Getting up to speed on the proceedings against Ilhan Omar

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a roundup.

From Ace. An excerpt:

She lied about being 17 when she applied for citizenship, because the law stated that a minor could piggyback off a naturalized parent’s citizenship but an adult couldn’t.

So she changed her actual age, 18 or 19, to 17.

Then her staffers changed her Wikipedia entry, which had shown her real birthdate, to her fraudulent birthdate, so that it would agree with her fraudulent immigration paperwork.

That last part isn’t illegal. It just shows she knows she was lying all along.

Powerline has been writing about Omar for many years, and they are (unsurprisingly) covering the current developments fairly thoroughly. A sampler can be found here and here.

From Legal Insurrection:

Speaking on Fox News’ “America Reports,” Pirro said her office was examining Omar’s financial disclosures, which previously showed that the reported value of businesses tied to her husband, Tim Mynett, had surged from as much as $51,000 in 2023 to as much as $30 million in 2024.

—

The original filings, examined by Fox News Digital earlier this year, showed millions of dollars in newly reported assets associated with two of Mynett’s business ventures — a California-based winery and a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm.

More on Omar’s father and her citizenship application can be found here.

Jonathan Turley summarizes here: