League of Melbotis

Fat Kids in Crisis: A Nation Mourns

Headline News ran another story about childhood obesity. Today's topic was about stapling kids' stomachs to curb the fatness. THis was after they brought on two ugly teenagers to demonstrate how to properly wear a bicycle helmet.

Okay, look... this is the sort of thing I'm going to obsess about, so i just want to prepare everyone. I plan to now count the number of days in a row I have to hear about obesity on Headline News. We're on Day 2

And if your kid can't wear a helmet properly (and I know I've just doomed any future Steans progeny by saying this outloud), isn't there something called Natural Selection? If you're 15 and you're wearing your bike helmet, say... sideways... you're probably going to end up getting killed sooner or later doing something like chasing a shiny object into heavy traffic.

On the legal front, The Supreme Court refused to hear the Jesus Castillo case out of Dallas. Jesus sold a really nasty adult Japanese comic book to an undercover cop. The comic contained all kinds of stuff unfit for the pages of The League, but we think this is silly. Couple of things: the comic was in a marked off section clearly labeled "for adults only", and rumor had it that a rampaging PTA mom had threatened the shop because they would not sell her Pokemon cards wholesale. THis same woman then appeared at PTA meetings and began making a stink about the shop, and the idea is that she basically set them up. Also, the actual store was not the one which got in trouble, it was the hapless minimum wage clerk... poor guy. But, apparently, because of "community standards" rules, what the cop did was legal, as were all the proceedings. (Jim and I discussed this off-line. It's actually fairly interesting, You should ask him about the laws.)

The final argument prosecutors used basically defied considerable expert testimony, piles of evidence and sheer logic, but appealed emotionally to the selected jurists and their preconceived notions (leaving me to wonder how awful the Defense attorney really was). Basically she argued that comics are for kids (dismissing all evidence about sales, etc...), and that poor Jesus must be trying to corrupt kids. (BTW, no actual kids ever obtained illicit material from the store, but that wasn't the point). It's kind of a messed up story, and it has unleashed the usual anti-Texas sentiments upon the comic geek internet sites. I find this irritating, if nothing else.

I invite anyone drifting in from Jim's legal sites to review this decision and try to find out if the Castillo guy has to do anytime in the slammer.

I'm not sure Japanese tentacle porn is exactly what I think of when I dream of a free country, but something appears to be broken here. The legal action demonstrates how vulnerable any of us could be. The truth is, if this is the precedent, a cop could walk into any bookstore and start arresting the clerks. A cop could arrest librarians and convenience store owners. One wonders what this would mean for Internet Providers and importers. At any rate, it's kind of creepy. And they picked on the one guy who couldn't afford to fund himself for an attorney so the CBLDF ended up picking up the considerable tab. Point being, even if he HAD been exonerated, as well assume justice would prevail, he would still have ridiculous legal fees to worry about, and that's not something an attorney is going to just forget about, nor a court for fees.