Chris McNutt, executive director of the nonprofit group Texas Gun Rights, blames Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen for a Constitutional Carry bill not being heard in the House. So he went to visit Bonnen's home. (Bonnen claims that McNutt knew Bonnen wasn't at home, and calls the visit "gutless.")

As a result, Poncho Nevárez, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said that "the behavior of certain groups and/or individuals who are unreasonable in their expectations and even more unreasonable in their behavior caused me to reconsider" having a hearing on the Constitutional Carry bill.

McNutt's visit to Bonnen's home was perfectly legal. Bonnen's point about gutlessness notwithstanding, McNutt had as much right to call on Bonnen's home as to call on anyone's.

American Lawyer Media's Angela Morris, interviewing me for this article, asked me why I am fighting Texas's revenge-porn statute.

Since I'm fighting these cases without getting paid nearly as much money as my time is worth (a roundabout way of saying pr* b*n* without using those words), it's a fair question for a lay audience (by which I mean "one not composed of First Amendment lawyers").

My answer, "Because somebody has to," didn't make it into the article. That's fair. It probably doesn't add much to the lay audience's understanding. After all, knowing nonconsensual publication of intimate visual material is a dick move, at the very least. Why does anyone have to make it any less legally risky?

So here's a better answer: Because someone is going to, and that someone had better be me.

I've talked about the power + presence + warmth model of charisma, and about Tshkay and colleagues' affability + influence model, in which they pick six self-observable traits to describe charisma:

1. Makes people feel comfortable.

2. Smiles at people often.

   ...

This is a note, extracted from the preceding post for special attention later.

For charismatic leadership, all of these should be congruent with the emotion that you are seeking to elicit:

1. The values you appeal to;

   ...

Thomas Sy and Calen Horton of University of California, Riverside; and Ronald Riggio of Claremont McKenna College, propose this model of charismatic leadership:

Hey, look. A loop!I love loops.

The article, Charismatic Leadership: Eliciting and channeling follower emotions, is published in Leadership Quarterly.

Here I solicited your self-ratings in six areas:

1. Has a presence in a room.

2. Has the ability to influence people.

   ...

On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is Strongly Disagree and 5 is Strongly Agree, please rate how much you agree that each of these six items describes you:

1. Has a presence in a room.

2. Has the ability to influence people.

   ...

Continuing our exploration of loops...

Some loops are entirely internal. For example, Zeigarnik discovered her effect by observing a waiter who could remember a party's entire order only until he had served it. He then promptly forgot who had ordered what.

The loops I am more interested in are shared between people. Of those, I see two distinct sorts: loops in which only one party is active, and loops in which more than one party is active.

I've been thinking about loops.

I wrote about loops here, and in the intervening nineteen months I've come to a better understanding of them.

Loops were called to my attention by the Zeigarnik Effect, which is that our minds will keep paying attention to open loops until the loops are closed. In hypnosis we use this effect to deliver suggestive payloads to the subconscious: if you open loop inside loop inside loop inside loop the conscious mind gives up trying to keep track of them, and you can make a suggestion, and then close the loops successively and the conscious mind will not be aware of the suggestion delivered to the unconscious mind.

Brad commented on Spotting Review Yelp Laundering:

If you check the WHOIS for MGA (whose physical address on Yelp is an apartment complex) on GoDaddy, the registrant for MGA's website is "Lior Mi" - at Grand Garage Door's physical address.

So Grand Garage Door and MGA Garage Door are run by the same people. Good to know.

The left torsion spring on our garage door broke, so I looked for a replacement part.

I called MGA Garage Door in Houston, and was told that they don't sell parts, but would send out a service guy to give me an estimate.

It turns out that the companies advertising "garage door parts" don't sell them. They're service companies. And they've got you over a barrel because if your garage door has broken there's a 50% chance your car is on the inside, and a greater chance that you want your car on the other side than it's on.

This weekend my kid and I took a machining class, learning the basics of running a milling machine. The instructor, a Greenfield-grade curmudgeon, had several stories of people using his machines incompetently and breaking things. The stories all ended, "and that's why I hate people."

Last Friday the Vermont Supreme Court in State v. Vanburen held that state's revenge-porn statute constitutional. Eric Goldman has a good first analysis of the opinion.

The court found, correctly, "that ‘revenge porn' does not fallwithin an established categorical exception to full First Amendment protection," and declined, correctly, "to predict that the U.S. Supreme Court would recognize a new category." So the statute is unconstitutional, right?

Every month or so for about the last year I've received an email purportedly marketing "estimators," "estimating services," or "material take-offs."

Emails have been from:

1. "Luke Shaw" of "International Estimating, LLC," 14 East, 4th Street, Suite 405, New York City, NY 10012;

   ...

And I think it's obvious that >95% of criminal convictions-including people who later turn out to be incontrovertibly innocent-being obtained through guilty pleas is deeply concerning. If you don't-and I still can't tell because you won't say-then we'll have to agree to disagree.- Clark Neily (@ConLawWarrior) August 11, 2018

I wrote on this topic some years ago, here. My sense then was that the slow death of the jury trial in federal criminal cases did not reflect what was happening here in Texas:

Closer to earth, where most criminal prosecutions actually take place, the dynamic can be quite different.

(b) A person commits an offense if:(1) without the effective consent of the depicted person, the person intentionally discloses visual material depicting another person with the person's intimate parts exposed or engaged in sexual conduct;(2) the visual material was obtained by the person or created under circumstances in which the depicted person had a reasonable expectation that the visual material would remain private;(3) the disclosure of the visual material causes harm to the depicted person; and(4) the disclosure of the visual material reveals the identity of the depicted person in any manner, including through:(A) any accompanying or subsequent information or material related to the visual material; or(B) information or material provided by a third party in response to the disclosure of the visual material.

The State Prosecuting Attorney, the Attorney General, and now the Galveston County District Attorney have all argued that the Tyler Court of Appeals in Jones should have interpreted subsection (b)(2) of section 21.16 of the Texas Penal Code to mean that a person commits an offense if

1. the visual material was created under circumstances in which the depicted person had a reasonable expectation of privacy, or

   ...

"The First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs."

The legislature must strike a balance between sexual-privacy rights and the First Amendment.

Because revenge porn does not fall within one of the enumerated categories of unprotected speech under the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, legislators must narrowly craft statutes to avoid infringing on important First Amendment rights.

I wrote yesterday about a loss, so I hope you'll indulge me in talking about two recent wins, one before the loss and one after.

A couple of weeks ago I described my bizarre oral-argument experience in Tyler, where the prosecutor (bless his heart) melted down in front of the court. I wrote:

When you're arguing with the court about how big you're going to win, it's a pretty good day.

This is a truly bizarre law. It presumes that there is "an interest in sex" that is not prurient. We are not sure what kind of interest that is. We are also left guessing at who gets to determine whether an image has sex appeal....What the "prurient interest in sex" means is anyone's guess. It would also be interesting to learn who the legislature believes should determine whether an image's artistic value is "serious."

Some dude on the internet.

Said dude is talking about the new Texas Possession or Promotion of Lewd Visual Material Depicting Child statute, section 43.262 of the Texas Penal Code:

I don't think I've ever voted in a State Bar election. I've certainly never endorsed a candidate.

But I feel compelled to endorse a candidate in this year's election for State Bar President.

Randy Sorrels is running on a platform of 12 Ideas (12! Like jurors! Or apostles! Or months!) most of which will make life better for us without making life worse for our clients. The few that I don't care for ("Texas Lawyers' Briefcase"?) at least won't do any harm.

I had argued to the jury that criminal court is the wrong place for common sense. The argument did not go over well-I got feedback that I seemed to think I was smarter than the jurors.

In deliberation jurors used their common sense, which flew in the face of the expert testimony in the trial.

Specifically, they said after the verdict that my client's BAC at the time of driving "must have been" higher than 80 minutes later, despite expert testimony that it was impossible to say what the BAC at the time of driving was from the blood test 80 minutes later. I hadn't presented the expert testimony well enough for the jurors to absorb it. I should have nailed it down better.