More Thuggery Fail! Brynaert Tries and (Hilariously) Fails to Get Someone To Reveal My Name

When I rattled the monkey cage, the howler monkey started howling, and is continuing to do so.  This time Ron Brynaert wrote to a long time internet rival to try to obtain my seeekrit identity.  I am going to leave the actual name of this person out of it because he didn’t make it clear whether or not he wanted me to include it.  But there is a frequent commenter who goes by the nickname Kman who...  I will be diplomatic and call him a long-time pain in my ass.  And I think he would gleefully accept the title “long-time pain in my ass” and wear it as a badge of honor.  But I did tell him my real name a long time ago, and when setting the record straight I mentioned that he knew my real name all along and didn’t reveal it to defend him against insinuations that he was somehow responsible my decision to reveal that Aaron Worthing was in fact a pseudonym.

So naturally Brynaert attempted to reach out to him.  While I obviously don’t agree with every word that Kman wrote in response, I think frankly it deserves to be published in full.  It’s that good.

But first the set up, Brynaert’s email.  The subject was apparently “Unlike Aaron Worthing”

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:11 PM, Ron Brynaert <ronbrynaert@yahoo.com> wrote:

You appear to be a real lawyer:

[link to a state bar’s directory omitted.]

But your feud with Aaron Worthing seems imaginary.  What gives?  Please explain.

Do you have any idea who this is?

[link to a state bar’s directory also omitted.]

Since Aaron claims to live in Virginia...it would be pretty wild if Tamara was Aaron and you're you...or you're both....

Anyway, he's libeling me at his Allergic blog.

If you are a for real liberal you will investigate and I'm sure want to help me find out his real name so that I can report him to the bar and sue him.

If you respond in any other way then perhaps I'm getting warm...and perhaps this hits closer to home for the P man himself.

thanks,

Ron Brynaert

You have to love that last bit: “if you don’t reveal it to me, then you are not a real liberal and then I am going to think you are in on the conspiracy.”  Join in my thuggery or fall victim to it.

And the response is beautiful. Like I said, I don’t agree with all of it, but really, it's top notch (language warning, though):

The American Bar Association Calls Out the LSAC for Its Disability Discrimination

Now, I should start by saying I have personal experience with all of this, which I will share some about in a moment.  But let me provide some background first.

The ABA sets standards for accreditation of law schools.  As of this moment, they require every single school to consider scores on the Law School Admission Test a.k.a. the LSAT.  The organization that administers it is the Law School Admissions Council, a.k.a. the LSAC.

And they are out and out bigots, at least toward people who have disabilities.  As I have shared at this blog, I have three learning disabilities.  I have faced severe discrimination because of those disabilities, so extreme that I ended up dropping out of high school.  It was what you would call hostile environment discrimination—that is making a person’s life hell until they walk away.  This was, of course, before the ADA existed.  Then a few years afterward, I decided to make a second go at obtaining an education.  I received accommodations on the GED exam, the SAT, the ACT and throughout my entire undergraduate education.  And indeed, I received the same accommodations throughout law school and on the bar exam.

In each case, the accommodations granted were identical and were tailored to my specific disabilities.  I will avoid the long discussion of each disability and the justification for the specific accommodation, but I will note that all of these institutions agreed that I should receive the same accommodations: double time, isolation, use of earplugs, and if the test had a significant written portion, access to a computer.  But when I made the same request to the LSAC they sent me back a letter denying the request for extra time.  That is right, they literally didn’t even address my full request and every effort to get them to even address it failed.  Later I verified that the letter they sent me was in fact a form letter—and a poorly-worded one at that—suggesting that as a practice they automatically rejected an entire class of requests for accommodations.

So I took them to court seeking a preliminary injunction against them forcing them to administer the test with accommodations.  After the test occurred, there would be a full trial on whether those accommodations were justified, and therefore whether they were required to score the exam and release those scores.

At the preliminary injunction hearing, their attorney made an outright bigoted argument, asserting that I was just faking these disabilities.  Anyone who actually deals with me would realize how ludicrous it was—it was almost as ridiculous as accusing a man in wheelchair with clearly underdeveloped legs of faking paralysis.  For instance, one of my three disabilities is dysgraphia.  That term describes a number of disorders, but in my case, it is an impairment in my fine motor skills that makes it so that it is very hard to write by hand; however, if you put me before a computer, I am pretty much normal.  It doesn’t affect my ability to form content, just to actually put it down on paper, by hand.  Because of this disability, my handwriting was frozen, developmentally speaking, at the eighth grade level.  And this idiot lawyer for the LSAC was claiming that I was faking that—indeed that I could fake that.

Thuggery Fail! Brynaert Tries (Desperately) to Out Me

When you rattle the monkey cage, the howler monkeys start howling.  So I get this in my email inbox tonight where Brynaert wrote to different officials at Yale seeking their help in obtaining my true identity.  Let’s fisk this sucker bit-by-bit:

Ron Brynaert ronbrynaert@yahoo.com

reply-to: Ron Brynaert

to: "AaronJW72@gmail.com" ,

 "publicaffairs.law@yale.edu" ,

 "patterico@gmail.com" ,

 "alumni.law@yale.edu" ,

[name and email of Yale official redacted],

[name and email of Yale official redacted]

Date: Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:58 PM

subject: Lawyer slanders using fake name

To whom it may concern,

I'm a journalist...

Really?  Because these days you are coming off as mainly an internet nutjob.  But oooookay...

...working on a story, and I've been menaced and harassed by anonymous trolls on the internet that have connections to conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart.

Which is a gloriously vague statement.  I mean in theory, I have connections to you, Brynaert.  Indeed, in theory you can connect any single person to any other person in six moves, hence the term “six degrees of separation.”  And did you know that you can do something similar in Hollywood connecting every person in “six degrees of Kevin Bacon?”

That being said if you really have been harassed or menaced, that is unfortunate.

Who can I talk to regarding Aaron Worthing, a conservative/libertarian blogger who writes outrageous things about real people while hiding behind a false identity?

Worthing admitted he used an alias last week when he "resigned" from  www.patterico.com...

Actually, I thought Patrick made it pretty clear that I was being asked to leave.  No resignation occurred.  Not that I hold any ill will toward Patrick about it, but facts are facts.  And you know, journalists are supposed to pay attention to facts.

... a blog run by Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney Patrick Frey...where he often talked about being a Yale Law School graduate.

Rattling the Monkey Cage: A Response to Ron Brynaert

You know, I probably shouldn’t do this.  Bluntly, I strongly suspect that Ron Brynaert is actually a little nuts.  And if anyone out there is a friend of his, see what you can do about getting the guy help.

But he has been going around denouncing me in dubious terms and I feel the need to respond.

Now, for the most part the reaction to my admitting that “Aaron Worthing” was actually a pseudonym has been positive and I have appreciated the support of long-time friends.  Still, if you want to hate me for having told this lie, perhaps calling me a liar, there isn’t much I can do about that, and to some degree I will understand.  In that situation, we aren’t in a factual dispute, just in a dispute over morality.  But I would ask those critics to ask themselves if a person is ever justified in lying and under what circumstances, because I believe there are very few of us who believe that lying is never justified ever.  But that is really a question you have to answer for yourself.

But I can clear up factual misconceptions and distortions, and just plain bad logic.  Which brings me to Brynaert.  I used to be moderately friendly with this guy during Weinergate until he became convinced I was part of some kind of anti-Anthony-Weiner conspiracy or something.  I never could understand what the theory was, given that Weiner confessed to the central allegation—that he was having cybersex with women who was not his wife, and often after he was married.  You know, because you need a conspiracy to explain an event as strange as a man stepping out on his wife.  (Note: sarcasm.)  Somewhere around that time he started coming after me for my twitter avatar pic.  You know, this pic on the side:

He claimed that this was in celebration of the murder of John F. Kennedy.  And I explained at the time that actually what amused me about the picture was the incongruity of the cute kitten doing an evil thing.  I think I have been pretty consistent in my denunciation of using murder to influence policy in a democracy.  And that’s all pretending I disliked Kennedy, and I don’t.  So for a day or so he came after me on twitter over a picture of a kitten with sniper rifle, and then felt so secure in his victory he made the entire thread disappear from my view when he was done.  Believe it or not, all that will be important in a moment, as stupid as that is.

Anyway, at his crappy little blog, he points out that I was anonymous prior to starting the another blog and that I gave a different “excuse” for being anonymous back before I started the blog, so therefore I must necessarily be lying about my reason for being anonymous now.  But in fact there isn’t even a contradiction, there.  This is what I said in revealing that “Aaron Worthing” was a pseudonym:

It all started when I started this [other] blog..., I had planned on releasing my real name when starting this blog as part of my show of solidarity....  But I realized that as a married man, it was not just my life that I would be risking but my wife’s as well.  So I told her what I planned to do and asked for her consent.

And she refused to give it.

(emphasis added.)  So there are two obvious implications from that.  The first is that I felt my indentify should not be revealed without the consent of both myself and my wife.  And the second is that before I started this other blog, I didn’t want to reveal my real name.  And doesn’t that imply that I might’ve a reason for doing so?  Why, yes it does.

So as of January, 2010, I am saying that the reason why I was not giving my name was so that I could speak freely without fear of professional reprisal.  Specifically I said that I was learning disabled, my employers didn’t generally know this, and I feared discrimination if that fact became widely known.  Since Mr. Brynaert has seemed to express some sympathy for gay people, and gay people have been known to be “in the closet” for years, if not their entire life, you would think he would at least understand where I was coming from on that point, even if he disagreed.  I didn’t mention whether my wife consented to this, because it wasn’t relevant; I refused to reveal my name for my own reasons.

Then as suggested in the passage above, I decided that I wanted to reveal my actual name when starting other blog.  So I went and asked my wife for her consent, and she said no, for her own separate reasons.  So the timeline is simple.  First I was refusing to reveal my name; then I decided I was willing to, but my wife was not. You are free to doubt the veracity of those statements, but there is nothing at all inconsistent about it.

And then there are the deliberate, misleading distortions that Brynaert engages in.  None of these quite amount to lying, but you can see for yourself that he is very deliberately giving you a false impression.

The Poison Pill of Bestiality in Repealing the Military Ban on Sodomy

So Congress has been working on a repeal on the military’s ban on sodomy between humans.  And believe it or not you have to make that specification “between humans” because the Uniform Code of Military Justice defines sodomy as including bestiality as well.  From CNS news:

Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

It states: "(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

Any lawyers out there will tell you that this isn’t too difficult to deal with in repeal.  Indeed, I suspect most non-lawyers get that, too.  Instead of repealing the entire section in its entirety, all Congress has to is direct that the current statute be replaced with something close to this:

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

There, that’s not so difficult, is it?  Except for some reason the version passed in the Senate didn’t do that; instead it repealed the whole thing.  Which led to silliness like this:

Which, um, talk about whiffing an easy throw.  Mr. Carney, the correct answer is “No, the President does not support bestiality.  Next question.”  Or if throw in the phrase “are you an idiot?” if you are feeling cranky.  But instead Carney stupidly chose to ignore the question. This then gives Michele Bachmann an opening to denounce the whole thing when talking to Glenn Beck:

And even those attention whores at PETA had to stick their noses into it, denouncing Carney for his idiotic response:

“We were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality,” the group wrote in a letter to Carney. “With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed — and for good reason.”

This might have been taken seriously before the last fifty or so idiotic attention-whoring stunts like telling people to drink beer instead of milk.  PETA has squandered whatever credibility they ever had.

But the truth what is going on here is revealed by this passage in The Hill piece quoted above:

As the final Defense authorization bill gets hammered out in conference committee, one surprising issue is riling both social conservatives and animal rights activists: the repeal of a ban on sodomy and bestiality.

The Senate bill, which was passed last week, removed an article from the Uniform Code of Military Justice stating “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.”

But the article is still included in the House bill, and House Republicans want it to remain in the final bill.

(Emphasis added.)  Now, no one has figured out why the Senate version also repealed the ban on bestiality, but however it happened, it seems that House Republicans are using this as what is classically known as a poison pill.  If you are unaware of the tactic, here’s how it works.  If Congresspersons want to kill a law, but can’t quite get it voted down as is, they then insert something into the law that they believe will render the law unacceptable.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 demonstrates both 1) how the approach is supposed to work, and 2) how it can backfire.  Did you ever wonder why it was that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came to protect people not only from racial discrimination but also gender-based discrimination?  Well, because racists opposed to the law proposed adding language extending the law’s prohibitions to sex-based discrimination, that’s how.  They believed that this would render the bill unacceptable to just enough members of Congress to allow them to defeat it and when some Congresspersons in favor of the bill tried to remove the language prohibiting sex discrimination, a coalition of racists and feminists blocked the effort.  The racists were gambling that this provision would prove to be a poison pill that killed the entire thing, while the small minority of feminists hoped it would still pass.  And surely you know who turned out to be right.

So that is plainly what is really happening right now.  Like I said, no one has explained how the bill came to be in its current form.  I would never assume that stupidity is not a possible explanation.  But however it got there, it seems pretty obvious that it is being retained as a poison pill.  How would you like to run for Congress next year when your opponent can correctly assert that you voted to legalize sex with animals in the military? I am not particularly happy about that approach—I prefer policies to be determined in a much more straightforward approach than that. I mean today it will be Republicans using the poison pill of legalizing bestiality.  Tomorrow it will be Democrats sticking in a provision requiring cute puppies to be drowned in an effort to kill a bill that would actually balance the budget.  And in either case it means that a bill’s fate  is less likely to be determined by its merits, which is not a good thing in a republic.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Might be Very Light Blogging Today...

You may have seen me complain about this on Twitter, but basically at the house I am on day five of my plumbing system being completely frakked.  Basically there was at least one burst pipe, maybe more, in the line to the sewer.  Which means that I have water, but I can’t let very much of it go down the drain, or it will back up and our sewer water will pour out of the drain in our basement.  Oy.

And this is, believe it or not, the second round of my fun on this kind of thing.  I could tell you stories, but they would be incredibly disgusting stories.  Let's just say sh*t happens and leave it at that.

So this has been disrupting my life all weekend, and it looks like much if not all of today will fall victim to the problem as well.  I’ll try to get something out the door this morning before the plumbers get here, and then we’ll take it from there.  That also means that my plan this weekend to retroactively update a lot of posts at my two blogs to reflect the fact that “Aaron Worthing” was a pseudonym has been put on hold.  But maybe I can get at it later today.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Shorter Obama: Prognosticating on the Economy is Above My Pay Grade!

I think that is a reasonable, albeit snarky, summary of what he said on 60 Minutes.  A lot of other people are focusing on Obama saying that he didn’t overpromise on the economy but right at the beginning is the part that left me stunned:

[Update: The video player was not playing the correct video.  I will try to find an alternate source.  In the meantime, you can watch the video at the Blaze.]

And in case you can’t watch the video, the Blaze has a good summary of the passage:

Still, he said the unemployment rate could drop to 8 percent before the general election in November.

“I think it’s possible,” Obama said, “But — I’m not in the job of prognosticating on the economy. I’m in the job of putting in place the tools that allow the economy to thrive and Americans to succeed.”

Well, then Mr. President, you did something that was above your pay grade.  And in doing so, you bet your ass you overpromised:

Once again, the lowest line is what your administration said would happen if we passed the stimulus.  The middle line is what they claimed would happen if we did nothing.  And that top squiggly line, is what has been happening despite—or perhaps because of—your stimulus.

And here are a few other examples of you prognosticating on the economy.  From the State of the Union, 2011:

Tweets of the Day: Twitterers in Love

Update: Blazing Cat Fur links and is skeptical.

I don’t know who @Snarky_Basterd is.  I don’t know who @suziplasse is. But apparently he asked asked her to marry him, on twitter.

Here’s hoping they don’t act like a bunch of twits and live a happy and prosperous life together.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  But not proposals because I am already married after all.

Friday Frivolity—The "To Kill a Finch" Edition!

Before I started guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications, Patrick started a tradition of running a “Sockpuppet” post every Friday.  In that thread everyone was given permission to use multiple false nicknames impersonating other people in the thread in order to make jokes.  Like with what is in the news, you can expect someone to pretend to be Alec Baldwin, and what do you know?  Here it is.  So when I started there I continued the tradition and added something to it: a Friday Frivolity.  I found some light item and posted about it in the same sockpuppet thread.fou

Well, now that I have came back here, a couple people asked me whether I would run a sockpuppet thread and my answer was that there wasn’t enough of a commenter community here, yet.  That might change.  I have only just begun to allow comments, after all.  And really, if you want to goof around and do an obvious sockpuppet in a thread, including this one, I ain’t going to object, as long as it is obvious in some way.

But I can certainly do frivolity and for this week we have one of Cracked’s excellent lists, this time of movie lawyers who were bad at their jobs (language warning at the link, as is the case with all links to their site).  I am embarrassed to say that I have not seen enough of these movies to really appreciate much of the commentary.  In fact, I am particularly embarrassed to say that I have never seen To Kill a Mockingbird, because it is universally considered a classic.  But I have listened to a book on tape version one time when travelling back and forth from law school and my parents’ home in Texas, and presuming the author of this list is accurately describing the movie, I think this criticism is unfair:

If Peck was such a brilliant lawyer, why didn't he petition for a change of venue? Even Matthew McConaughey's character thought to request a change of venue, and he's Matthew McConaughey.

A change of venue is a legal concept that was basically developed for this very purpose. If it is believed that a fair trial cannot be obtained in the proper jurisdiction, the proceedings can be moved elsewhere "in the interest of justice." There's no way in hell Tom would get a fair trial in Whiteyville, so Peck could just petition to move things elsewhere. One could argue that since the judge has the final say on whether to grant a change of venue, he would just deny the motion for no reason other than being a racist prick, making the gesture pointless. However, Judge Taylor is shown to sympathize with Tom Robinson and holds Peck in high regard (he's actually the one who appoints him as Tom's legal counsel), so there's no reason to believe he wouldn't grant the motion.

Well, of course, the purpose of a change in venue would be to move the trial to a place where your were more likely to have an unbiased jury.  This is takes place just before World War II (at least the book does), and we are talking about Alabama, okay?  They were not talking about changing venue to Massachusetts, they were talking about finding a place in Alabama prior to the entire Civil Rights Movement, where a black man could get a fair trial when he was accused of raping a white woman.

Obama’s Economic Illiteracy on Display: Extending Unemployment Benefits is Stimulus!

I heard about this gem on Twitter last night, but I couldn’t find a citable source until this morning:

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline," he said, "they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance."

Okay, folks let me explain something to you that maybe a lot of you don’t know—I mean, bluntly a lot of people don’t know this in my experience.  Do you know how unemployment benefits are paid for?  In the three jurisdictions I work in (Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.), and I believe in almost all of the rest of the country, it works like this.  Employers are required to contribute directly to the unemployment benefits fund.  Their contribution is determined by their “experience rating.”  There is a lot of complicated numbers in their formulae, but it really comes down to this.  Just about every dime of benefits paid out to an ex-employee gets taken out of the respective ex-employer’s hide.  If a former employee gets $30,000 in benefits in a given year, you can bet that one way or the other the employer will have to pay very close to $30,000 that they would not have had to pay but for that employee getting benefits.

Now this cost can be avoided by different means.  The most common one is by showing that the conduct of the ex-employee was so bad that it justified termination.  If that happens, then the ex-employee gets no benefits, and the employer doesn’t have his or her experience rating increased.  Generally the misconduct has to be reasonably severe and it can’t just be, “we found someone better than him/her.”  In this way, then, the unemployment benefits system is a tax on terminations that are based on anything but misconduct of a relatively severe nature.

So any rational employer  recognizes that if they hire a new employee they run the risk of needing to fire them and then having to pay unemployment benefits for months to come.  Last I heard we were already forcing employers to pay for 99 weeks of benefits, almost two years.  So every time you increase unemployment benefits, you increase the risk and costs associated with hiring new employees.

Now surely Obama would respond by arguing that by giving these unemployed people free money, they are likely to spend more money and that will have a stimulative effect on the economy leading to more job creation.  But that benefit is theoretical at best and so far the Obama administration has had a proven track record of being wrong on this point.

After all, let’s not forget  this chart:

Now that chart is a few months old, and the unemployment rate has crept down to 8.6% since then.  And even that number is not really as good as you might think.  Let’s let Business Week explain this to you:

A big drop in the jobless rate isn’t always good news. A lot depends on what causes the drop. Remember, the unemployment rate is calculated by adding up all the people who tell government surveyors that they can’t find work and dividing it by all the people in the labor force—those either employed or actively looking. So if people give up searching, they’re no longer counted as unemployed, and the rate falls. In November about two-thirds of the improvement in the jobless rate came from people dropping out of the labor force and thus out of the calculation of the unemployed. Only one-third was because of actual job creation.

So in other words about two times as many people gave up on looking for lawful employment* as gained new jobs.

And even if you update the chart to the current 8.6% the fact is that this is still significantly higher than Obama said it would be, even if we didn’t pass the stimulus.  As I wrote over at Patterico’s Pontifications:

Logically there are only two explanations for why things are the way they are:

1.      Either the Obama administration stinks at making predictions; or

2.      They’re making it worse.

That’s it.  There is no third option.  And either way, it leads us to the same conclusion: they need to stop what they are doing.  The reason why option #2 leads to that [conclusion is] obvious, but the reason why option #1 leads there is less so.  The reason why their inability to predict accurately proves they need to stop is simply that if they can’t predict the future, then they can’t possibly know what the effects of their policies would be.

What we need at this point is for a President who will take the Hippocratic [Oath] before attempting to treat our economic “body.”  Like Hippocrates, we need a president who understands first and foremost that he or she doesn’t know very much about the “body” that s/he is treating and therefore he or she must follow the maxim “first, do no harm.”  Obama stands before us today saying (paraphrase), “trust me, the economy would have been in much worse shape today if I didn’t intervene.”  He is like one of the quacks of old who bled a person to death’s door, claiming that if he hadn’t, then the patient would have been in even worse shape.

The maxim “first, do no harm” means that you don’t do something you know will hurt the “patient” on the hope (without proof) that the benefits will outweigh the harm.

Applied to this situation, the President is proposing to do something that we know will reduce the incentives of businesses to hire new employees.  You can be almost guaranteed that this will put a downward pressure on hiring.  On the other hand, he is also hoping that this will have a stimulative effect.  Even forgetting how just plain bad he is at predicting what will and will not stimulate the economy, that would be a dubious proposition.  First do no harm, Mr. President.  Do not depress hiring in the hopes that something good might come out of it.

And you know what really helps the economy? New hiring.  And that is because instead of paying people not to work, then you are paying them to work.  And that in turn means that those people just might help in the creation of real things that create real wealth.  Hiring 100 new employees at an auto plant is not economically identical to paying the same 100 people to sit on their duffs all day, because the members of the first group are not only receiving money that they will presumably pay into the economy, but they are creating real things of real value.

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* I wonder why economists never consider the possibility that some of these people dropping out of the labor pool might in fact be turning to illegal professions such as drug dealing or prostitution.  Now by the very nature of such work, it will be almost impossible to estimate how many people left the workforce for this reason, or just gave the hell up, you have to think that this is at least part of the explanation.

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Update: I should thank JWF for giving me this link.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.