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Afternoon Links: Pro Se Litigants for the Win, Louise Linton Raked Over the Coals

By Jim Swift

Occupational Licensing Stinks. At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf laments the declining right to earn a living. While criticism of occupational licensing is not a new or novel concept (we’ve covered it extensively), I did learn something sort of horrifying: Tree trimmers and cosmetologists in some locales are required to undergo more training than do EMTs.

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Pro Se can you see? Pro se litigants are often crazy, and they often waste many a judge’s time with novel legal theories. Sometimes, though, they hit on something big. In South Carolina, they’re dealing with #Sealmageddon: a scandal resulting from the secretary of state’s failure to stamp papers:

For nearly a decade-and-a-half, [Mark] Hammond been failing to perform one of his most basic constitutional duties – affixing the “Great Seal of the State” onto acts and resolutions passed by the S.C. General Assembly. His failure to perform this ministerial task – which we explored in detail in this follow-up report – has potentially invalidated hundreds of pieces of legislation passed by lawmakers over the past decade-and-a-half.

Whoops.

Louise Linton gets the Williamson treatment. Regular readers know that we’ve been critical of D-list actress and Cabinet-level spouse Louise Linton. Imagine our happiness when we learned that National Review‘s Kevin Williamson skewered her on our venerable competitor’s site. Here’s my favorite part:

She also published a book, In the Shadow of Congo, a memoir about the semester abroad she spent in “war-torn Zambia,” a tale replete with child soldiers, Hutu–Tutsi ethnic warfare, monsoons, and the general horror of the Congolese war that beset the “angel-haired” (her description of herself) visitor from the United Kingdom. There were many problems with that account, including the fact that the Congolese war wasn’t fought in Zambia, which has in fact never been at war, but if it had been at war, that war wouldn’t have been the Hutu–Tutsi conflict, which happened in Rwanda, which isn’t where Linton was. She was down in Zambia, which does not have the monsoons she claimed to have endured. The book was a gross and embarrassing example of the “white savior” genre, and a particularly illiterate and dishonest one at that. It has been withdrawn from publication.

Read the whole thing.

Finally, good news for Monsanto. If you have “Foodie” friends on social media, nary a day goes by without some conspiracy indicting poor Monsanto. Finally, some good news: Large U.S. farm study finds no cancer link to Monsanto weedkiller. Get your RoundUp ready!

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