I believe, contrary to many people including many Constitutional originalists, that broad rights of privacy are essential to liberty and thus among the unenumerated, God-given, unenumerated fundamental rights of individuals mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as well as being more explicitly covered in the Fourth Amendment, to the U. S. Constitution. However, I have some hard questions when people start talking about rights of privacy in connection with driving while intoxicated on alcohol, drugs, substances, or any combination thereof. I have been actively involved in lobbying and campaigning for certain laws protecting real rights of privacy, including medical and psychological privacy, and in litigation over rights of privacy and invasions thereof.
How is a measurement of alcohol level taken in, and by a device you know is installed in, your own car an invasion of your privacy?
For that matter, since when is driving a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, much less doing so when your being impaired by alcohol or other drugs is very likely to endanger the lives and safety of other people as well as their property, a private act, or an act in or concerning which you would have any reasonable expectation or right of privacy?
It also totally escapes me how some people insist vehemently that announced cameras that catch people running red lights or otherwise dangerously violating traffic laws while operating a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, where violations endanger lives and property, implicates much less violates any identifiable, much less arguable, right of privacy.
The fellow came with the RIAA baggage when President Obama chose him for his present high-level job in the White House. Of course he's going to side with the RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry and intellectual property holders. So, I believe, would any Solicitor General under a Republican administration. The Solicitor General argues in the Supreme Court but the Attorney General and President essentially tell him which side to support.
One of several problems with the alleged rise of the alleged cognitive elite, i.e., college graduates and incomes, is that measuring this alleged rise by mean average gross income fails to alert one to several problems.
I have 97th percentile verbal ability scores as a mature adult, down from 99/4th percentile as a high school senior when that made me a National Merit Scholarship finalist. I only have one earned doctorate, from one of our leading universities generally ranked near the top in my field. I know a lot of other people with bachelors’ and advanced degrees. Like an awful lot of the rest of the people I know, an awful lot of those I know with high intelligence, degrees, including advanced degrees in math, physics, and other fields supposedly in demand, and ambition, are now, and likely will remain, unemployed or terribly under-employed.
Recently published data suggests something that a lot of us had suspected: A huge percentage of college students don’t actually learn anything, or much of anything, in college. Thus, using college graduation as a measure of the “cognitive elite” is ludicrous.
As for cognitive elites, let’s face it, the Chinese and a couple dozen other countries, some of which you probably couldn’t name and which we used to think of as poor, benighted, Third World, etc., outrank us not only in college and advanced degree enrollment and graduation, but in English as well as math. Unless you believe in racial theories of intelligence, and I don’t, something is wrong. I have hired a number of high school seniors, and others, whose IQ scores, for example—a very imperfect measure of what one can be expected to do with their brain in real life in my view—are well above average, who, like far too many, from native-born, English-speaking homes, have been allowed to get to that point without becoming fluent in spoken and written English, or learning to balance a checkbook much less excel in higher math and computers.
This article does note that today it can take someone, especially someone not born with a silver spoon, to age forty (40) just to break even after accounting for the opportunity and education costs to get there. That’s way too old, beyond the best child-bearing years, for example, and at a point where, laws to the contrary notwithstanding in tough times, you have probably already been told, as I was at 38 “You’re too --- ---- old.” Lots of luck if you’re 50 or 55 and get laid off in the new economy.
There are an awful lot of our cognitive elite, many of whom I know, who can’t find a job using their education or much of it, or which pays enough to cover their debts and other cash and opportunity costs of higher education. I knew one bright, motivated individual just shy of finishing his dissertation and boards for his Ph.D. in math and physics who taught one computer course at the state university here but had to turn to roofing to make a living. I know two more Ph.D. candidates, one in math, who found the best job they could get was teaching English in China. Computer and defense contract people I knew who were making $80,000.00 to $100,000.00 have found themselves commuting halfway across the country for temporary jobs at a fraction of their former salaries, when, after stints loading boxcars for minimum wage, they can find anything using their cognitive abilities, which is resulting in bankruptcies, family breakdowns, suicide attempts and suicides in these families, etc.
My primary abilities are verbal rather than in math, and real incomes for most of those in my field, even if, like me, you graduated in the upper third of a selective class from a top university at the graduate level have not kept pace for a generation, and are now dropping for the handful at the top whose employers have and their clients, whose incomes were essentially insulated from any real broad market. I remember when the same thing happened to the aerospace engineers, etc. Ther
I'm not p;ostingthis anonymously, but the right to do so goes back deep into American history, including the authors of the Federalist papers supporting ratification of hte Constitution publishing under the pseudonym "Publius," and I sometimes do post anonymously, usually where identifying myself would tend to identify someone else whose privacy I have a legal or moral duty to protect, or where there may be a danger of retaliation. I have several questions about this report and the proposal it describes. First, which of the big companies with bought and paid for political pull would get the profitable contract? What will protect us against such "trusted ID" being linked toour medical and other records? Who decides who is to be "trusted?" I can't get anybody at Homeland Security and its TSA to issue me a Trusted Flyer ID or even tell either my Senator orme me why not or whether or not I can get on a plane. As for the distinction between State and Federal ID cards, that has been erased by the feds using the "spending power" to compel the states to conform to their plan for uniformity and access. I just went through a months-long, expensive effort before getting my expired state ID reissued. My birth certificate lists neither a father nor a mother, The CIA absurdly and falsely had me on a list of Soviet spies and sympathizers and lied to my Senator and me about this for years under both parties. I would want a whole lot more and verifiable information before trusting the federal government or anyone in it with any more data and power.
This work is finally done and this study published in 2011, after this study, consisting of all of twelve (12) alleged cases, was published in 1998, twelve (12) years ago, years after the original journal withdrew its sponsorship, after court proceedings based upon and challenging this study were long over, and after countless studies failed to reproduce the results and otherwise called this into question.
We have seen some newer studies into the cause or causes of autism but, as of now, still don't know what causes it, how to prevent it, etc.
I'm 72. This is said to affect a lot of individuals, I've seen figures from one in 158 to one in 142, and I know people with it, and others who have studied it, in recent years, but never saw or heard of anyone with these symptoms when I was in school. If they redefine it in the DSM-V, we'll never decipher the results. It's not the only terrifying medical problem, back to polio in the early fifties. for the cause or transmission of which I have seen people fervently committed to theories. This isn't in my expertise, though evidence is, and I don't know.
in practice, peer review is only a weak pre-screening process that often rejects good papers and accepts bad work."
I knew it! I managed to get through statistics in college but statistics, and math, are not my strong suit. Nevertheless, the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and silicone breast implant companies persuaded the Supreme Court to require publication in the right journals and peer review before accepting any new scientific, or non-scientific expert, work as evidence. It took years even with that requirement before somebody figured out that two different batches of bullets might match up just as though they had come from the same melt of metal. The rub is that nobody is ever going to do meaningful "peer review" on the odds for and against many events until they start costing big businesses and their insurers big bucks so it becomes important, and profitable, to prove that you can't prove what's going on. The Supreme Court of Texas took this one step farther, in relation to something that does require very, very careful expert work, and held that, since there were no experts yet who they recognized in a subject, there would be no way to ever become one. Some things you end up trying to prove or defend against in court didn't happen enough times to make statistics and statistical significance significant, but that proves nothing.
By the way, who oversees who is selected to review these articles. This author, who seems to be a real expert in some areas, reveals the truth, that not all these human reviewers are much good. Is anybody really surprised?
As a retired lawyer, I agree with you and the Ohio court. They already have the phone in custody without a warrant, ok. Your cell phone or laptop is the modern equivalent of the Founders' roll-top desk and "papers and effects." Get a warrant. Considering how easy that is in practice, and how few applications are ever actually turned down, by the non-lawyer JP, municipal judge, or mayor who qualify as a "detached and neutral magistrate," why ever not apply. Now the police here let the thief, already on probation, walk out of jail with my wife's engagement ring, identified from a fax, before it reached them from here in the next town.
What, precisely, besides the kind of fishing expedition warrants were designed to avoid, would the police be looking for if they arrested you, as they can, without a warrant, for not wearing your seat belt, jaywalking, or the ever-popular broken taillight or dirty or misplaced license plate, as the Texas and U. S. Supreme Court have held justifies an arrest though the "crime" carries no jail time after conviction. Hey, in my law practice, I had two official arrest reports that said the defendant was arrested for being in a "high crime and drug-dealing area," that just happened to be the sidewalk in front of the police station," among other such slim grounds.
Don't kid yourself that you, your wife, or your teenage daughter have nothing to fear from erosion of the Fourth Amendment and other Constitutional guarantees because you are law-abiding citizens. "They came for the Jews and I wasn't a Jew, . . . then they came for me . .." is all too true. I know several people arrested because of theft of their identities, etc. "Driving While Black" will get you arrested and hassled. Information on your phone or computer that can cause an innocent person trouble can include having been called, wrong number or otherwise, by a "known criminal," evidence of an unpopular belief or association, etc. I’m pro-life, but calling an abortion provider or any other provider of physical or mental health services is supposed to be private and confidential. Good luck if the combination or password you hid in your phone matches the safe that was rifled at your doctor’s office. Have you called Crimestoppers, Child Protective Services, the Medicare Fraud Hot Line, or the person at the local paper who is publishing a series of articles on problems in the local police department? If not, are you prepared to be accused of misprision of a felony for not reporting something someone may decide that you knew or had good reason to believe relating to certain crimes? Have you ever tried, or needed, to prove that you did not commit a crime?
Chemical Rubber Company, CRC, now that takes me way back to buying the CRC tables book when starting four years of elective math in junior high and high school about 1953. Also my older brother's first good K & E slide rule. I got to college and discovered, to my horror, that higher math was not my thing, Computer literacy was being taken down to a big old-fashioned double-glass clean computer room, with tubes, wires, and punch cards, and being told "That's a computer. It thinks in ones and zeroes. DON'T GO IN THERE!" One of my classmates went on to MIT, as I had hoped to do, and figured in the use of computers to transform his chosen industry. I moved into law. Did some work regarding introduction ofr early word processors in law office but didn't even get a computer, including the big decision whether to splurge on the large 40 MB hard drive, and start trying to learn what I could about it until the late eighties.
I remember reading BYTE. Some I could understand, some I never did. With the aid of some friends, I got to the point where I could do a lot of things in DOS using simple instructions, batch files, etc.
Forced to "migrate" as they called it, to Windows 95, which necessitated a major upgrade, some time after my secretary had made that change as some essential programs no longer came in DOS, I have never yet found a book I can read, given my uncorrectable vision limitation and the smaller and smaller, and compressed, type used, or anywhere, including the computer science department at the state university here, which triggered the book type size etc. problem, via which I have been able to learn to do in any language in Windows some of the things I could do in DOS 5.0, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, etc.. Some oft he new and improved legal programs to keep up with amendments in the Bankruptcy Code, etc., were awful both from a legal and word processing, and a computing, standpoint. I managed to make the transition from WP 5.1 to Word but you have to dig for keyboard macros, operators, etc. and Word insists I want to do things nobody would be likely to do. I wish somebody would come up with a good on-line site that assumes you just got here from the dark side of the moon and were not a math person but had a little sense and were picking up bits and pieces, and that the first thing you might need to do would be to create some data lists, and then use those in designing a series of documents and some programs based upon forms, rules of court that sometimes measure from different points, etc. There really ought to be ways for someone without the math needed for an advanced degree in computer science or programming to create programs that would do basic things, some of which I know are needed in thousands of small ot medium sized legal and other offices, that either are wildly beyond their price range, would take a full-time year's work to learn, or both, or just don't do right, i.e. the way we rather than math majors do things.
Everybody else I know over the age of eight knows how to hack into things I can't get into, too. One guy in our jail somehow managed to get advanced news, he said on line, of a 41 defendant child porn rid that the local authorities were not even supposed to know about, I thought he was bluffing until the story broke with that number, and the FBI won't tell me anything about it, including why and how the open public records of those 41 arrests somehow disappeared after the first news stories. I'm not interested in most felonies but need to be abel to track down stories that don't show up in a typical Google search, and protect myself from bad hackers etc. Maybe that's a niche this new start-up using the old BYTE name could fill. Hope it doesn't turn out likie some other good old magazines that either never caught on again or the new iteration was filled with a bunch of junk.
Dogs can do some things in interactions with humans that we humans can not do or do as well. Dogs can learn to anticipate different types of epileptic seizures earlier and better than the individual can, or when the individual has no reliable aura to alert her to an impending seizure. too.
How many humans do you know who can tell in advance, as dogs have been trained to do, when their master or mistress is about to have a strong emotional reaction, including but not limited to a flashback, rooted in some traumatic events earlier in life before she and the dog met, know when to hide because her master is reacting to such earlier events and neither the dog nor anyone else can get through, which can be dangerous for everyone, or when, with expert help, the mistress is returning to her present, adult state and the dog's presence is again helpful, needed, etc. Paralyzed Veterans of America has backed some research into using service dogs for vets with this common condition, reported even by the most highly decorated veteran of World War II when it was called battle fatigue.
This research has also been extended to and verified among survivors of child and adult sexual assault, and service dogs have been properly certified for this. My law practice, etc., unexpectedly came to deal with an awful lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, some of whom I met as children and some only as adults, in diverse matters, and one dog somehow became able to identify a survivor of such horrific child abuse, as an adult, with an amazing reliability I saw repeated, just like a trained bird dog responding to a covey of quail, etc. I think I could have qualified this dog as an expert and got a court to admit such evidence within the standards laid down by the highest federal and state courts.
You got this right.
What nobody has worked with here, that should have been done before the Supreme Court weighed in without such necessary evidence using its own standards, is how this interplays with the Court's misbegotten ruling that "virtual" child pornography depicting severe abuse [as they held earlier regarding commercial nude lap dancing, etc.] is protected by the First Amendment,no matter how indistinguishable from real, un-retouched photographs of real chnildren, though they concede that real child porn is not.
By the way, will some of you actual or alleged evolutionary biologists please explain how, in current evolutionary theory, the ability to distinguish something that, as a matter of invention and refinement, would not have existed, much less been an existential problem, 150 years ago, from another picture painted or otherwise produced, much less from a living being, would have had any occasion to develop at all, much less how it could and would have developed during this short time frame since invention of modern photography, etc.?
Thanks. Well said.
I am a retired lawyer who has seen it all.
Unfortunately, there are lawyers, judges, and legally-trained other elected officials palmed off on us by both parties, etc., who, like some of the auto mechanics, bankers, computer people, plumbers, and doctors, etc. I know, I know well enough that I would not trust them.
Anyone who posts "Anyone who disagrees with me . . . is just a part of the problem." would appear to be a very insecure fool.
There is a very real, relevant, and significant distinction between nonfiction, and fiction fairly dealing with the problem, of incest, rape, suh crimes against children, etc., and writings glofifying this and inviting perverts to wallow in it.
As for the Bible references, David and his immediate and extended family, etc., the next poster after you deals with that properly, showing that you have misinterpreted or misquoted, and misapplied, the Biblical accounts of such crimes and the lasting damage they cause.
This comment makes sense. Legitimate note-taking etc. on computer would have helped me.
There always seem to be "students" who ruin freedom for everyone else by provoking more and more detailed regulations, which are not the best way to run college or the world.
Never mind sitting in the back of the classroom. Don't go to class. Just pay full tuition (no scholarships for you unless you study and go to class and participate), party, binge, turn in your papers (anti-cribbing software is in place), pass the final, have all these facts on your transcript, and go get and perform well at a good job where they actually expect you to get work done right.
Now, after having acquired one earned doctorate and worked for years, I believe in liberal break, napping, etc., because it often contributes to performance. But going to class and playing games, texting or emailing, etc., is discourteous to faculty and other students, and raises grave questions about your character and motivation. Why go to cvollege to do that?
The Texas Legislature wound up disabling games etc. on state-issue computers intended to be used for work by our elected legislators. That actually interfered with using them to check facts, other states version of laws, etc.
If you really believe that you and yours will always succeed by being smarter, getting better grades, working harder, and be able to pay for all your own and your family's medical needs, you indeed are suffering delusions of meritocracy or whatever. I used to believe that stuff too. Then I completed my formal education and realized that the correlation between intelligence, education, hard work, etc., and wealth or income was largely a myth, especially when you started dealing with health care issues. The Founders of this nation noted in their writings that their descendants would be scattered economically, long before modern genetic research, not to mention unemployment statistics, confirmed this fact. If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?
The subject of the original blog post here did something I consider incredibly foolish, etc., but the answer is to save his life, fix him up, and then charge him for the cost of his emergency and later care, as well as any damages to drivers trying to avoid him, etc. That makes both better economic and general sense. Don't ask me why people do things like this, or other life-endangering stunts.
I'm a retired Texas lawyer with a lot of child abuse experience, and interest and some experience in privacy law, but don't know Michigan law.
In Texas, and most other states, if anyone acquires credible information giving reasonable cause to believe that a child has been, is being, or is in real danger of being abused or neglected, they have a legal duty to report this to Child Protective Services, and maybe to take some other actions to protect the child. Failure to do so is both a tort, giving rise to a claim for civil damages, and a crime.
Under what one commentator has called the "discrete indiscretions rule," the fact that a parent is having an affair is normally not relevant, and thus not admissible, until it is proven that the child knew what was going on and was upset and harmed by it.
Just as, here, contrary to a lot of old tales, the appellate courts have held that it is still burglary whether the door is locked or not, just as reaching into the back of the sheriff's pickup truck and stealing his case of beer is burglary of a vehicle, the fact that the passwords were physically accessible or easily guessed would appear to be irrelevant.
Reading someone else's Email, and particularly reading it and revealing its contents to a third party, is illegal. Under the Federal Communications Act, at 49 U.S.C. 405, it has long been illegal to use or forward the substance even of a ham or commercial point to point radio message that it is technically easy and legal to listen to.
I have been involved in divorce and child custody, etc., cases in which, for example, the husband accepted his estranged wife's offer, while the divorce was pending, to come clean his house. She found porn on paper and on what had been their computer, files obviously not hers. The court admitted the evidence and the husband lost custody as an explicitly stated result. No appeal so no definitive ruling binding in other cases.
I discovered, through credible third parties, credible evidence that a client had been raped by her father. Actually there was more than one such case and client, in some of which the client herself did, and in some of which she did not, ever tell me herself. Some such apparent abusers were office holders (both parties) and other high muckity-mucks with political influence. The law requires me to report this but the State Bar advised me that doing so would violate one or more of their Disciplinary Rules. Wrong, as statutes control over rules, but what can I do?
Not exactly on point, but interesting: Lawyer client of mine is having an affair. He switches his office phone from an answering service to his home after five. Wife answers. Paramour, not alerted to the change, tells the wife, who she thinks is the answering service, a message for the lawyer rescheduling their secret rendezvous. Admitted into evidence in very expensive divorce case.
I wouldn't bet a nickel how this case will turn out, but you can bet the ranch that the child will get lost in the beaurocratic shuffle and get hurt.
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I've only got one degree in economics, plus a J.D. in law. I live under what passes for deregulation and competition in Texas. I'm a fan, and have actually read, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, etc., not to mention his works on ethics, and diverse others' writings on such subjects as well. .
I defy anyone to make an intelligent and informed choice between electric utility provides in Texas, or Medicare Part D prescription drug plans mandated by federal law, etc I had to go through my state senator's office just to get the name and number of anyone with the oldest and leading electric provider that I could talk to when necessary. Nobody, including their executive or the state public utility commission, could or would advise me which plan of theirs, much less thneir competitors', would be best for us gienour historical usage and any other available data. The federally mandated annual Medicare Part D provider selection starts with your hving to predict what will happen and what drugs will be prescribe for youfor those conditions or events in the next yar, il.e., requires you to predict the future accurately at a very detialed level tht no casinowould take a bet on.
In Smith's classic, working, free market model, you would have many makers nad sellers, easy entry, no "pricing poer" and no power to "drive down the cost," and aouit the second ting my acquaintances learned in business school was never to go into any industry or business with any of those characteristics. The Consumer Credit Commissioner tells me nobody regulates Dell Financial or its lies and abuses. For that matter, nobody from locl law enforcement through hte state and federal DEA and White House Drug Czar under either the Republicans or the Democrats would do anything about an admittedly wide-open crack cocaine dealership on this block within a drug-free zone across the street from a state university and within a few blocks of two police stations, either. Considering the lobbying money and clout already used before the new federal consumer protection agency even gets staffed and opened, would anybody bet that it will be effective, either?
How dare you make such awfully scandalous allegations and give such aid and comfort to our enemies? Don't you realize that telling the truth, especially truth that the enemy and everyone else already knows becuase much of this has been published before, maybe without YouTuber video, violates, but commercial nude lap dancing is protected by, the First Amendment? Like a lot of the rest of the huge amounts of money shoveled to politically connected hogs by the Homeland Security Department, with the connivance of Congresses, under both parties, this is pure politics. Come, now, arrests and convictions are public record, and can you or Janet Napolitano at HS or Pistole at TSA identify one (1) single terrorist TSA has arested before they got, and prevented from getting onto, a plane or other target area?
Medieval looking fire axes have been on planes since I started flying over fifty years ago, so I presume any real terrorist knows about them. Ditto the comparably lax security around unskilled plane cleaners, loaders, and other ground personnel than pilots we entrust with the plane itself and or lives, meaning that his being allowd to carry a pistol after training raises his danger level to anyone except a terrorist or other violent assailant by about the same fraction of a percent as his carrying aq Twinkie. I'm a retired lawyer and every once in awhile somebody needs to point out that the legal definition of a "deadly weapon" quite naturally and properly starts with the word "anything." If I wanted to, I could probably still get the one blade out of a disposable razor that an inmate here got through jail and courthouse security and used to cut his lawyer's throat through. Have you seen the military manual suggesting using a BIC pen and other such unconventional weapons? TSA refuses to tell my U. S. Senator or me whether or not I am on their "no fly" list or am free to fly despite, for example, a congenital condition that is probable cause for a warrantless arrest here and in most jurisdictions, but people who have already used bombs against the Pentagon and other American targets have offices in and passes into the White House. The unpleasant fact is that we're over-reacting to terrorism, including shoe bombers, etc., just exactly the way Rules for Radicals, by Obama's late mentor Saul Alinsky, and other sources tell terrorists to goad the authorities into doing. They're costing us more in largely useless security theater than they could wiht a reasl attack. Of course, under Bush's people, HS and TSA pushed aluminum foil and duct tape as security, too.
Thee has long been a rule or rules against even taking a sound recorder into a federal and some state courthouses, etc. Having no place to leave mine when I arrived in another district and town by air and publiv ground transportation, I got into an argument in which I told someone I thought was a rent-a-guard tha didn't think an honest fellow would be afraid of a recorder. Turned out to be a federal judge. Tense moments. Caught flack for bringing one, with a secured prerecorded tape containing evidence the judge had asked me to bring, with the knockouts out to prevent recording over it, etc., to another courtroom. There is a rule permitting you to record certain creditors' meetings in bankruptcy unless someone hires a court reporter in which event you must turn it off nd buy a n expensive copy from the reporter if you need the info. A lot of these rules are to protect the monopoly incomes of court reporters.
One problem would be if you shot video of an undercover officer that ld to his cover being blown and possible injury or death, but you would n[t have that situation in the average police-citizen interaction one would be likely to want to record.
Then why is it a felony to recklessly touch an officer but only a misdemeanor for an officer or guard to, among other things, have sex, which couldn't possibly be consensual, with an underage kid in juvenile detention or juvenile prison, under Texas law, after two successive scandals involving both officers and officials that the Texas Rangers had to come in and break up, one under the current Republican governor and one under a former Democratic governor and legislature, and why wasn't this outrage corrected after the second of thee led to some other changes in the law? I think I know, but attorney-client and other privileged and confidential relationships and communications inhibit my saying it publicly.. Compare a lot of the penalties for crimes committed by politicians etc. and for strikingly similar ones committed by other people.
Oh, yes, corporations really are actually people. The Supreme Court has said so since very shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted over a century ago, and, as you must realize, and we all must accept, the Supreme Court "is not final because it is infallible, it is infallible because its decisions are final." That's why it took three quarters of a century to correct its decision upholding so-called "separate but equal" despite Harlan the Elder's prescient dissent in that case and overwhelming evidence that separate never was, never was intended to be, and never would be equal.
There is now a bitter and deeply divisive disagreement about the intent, purpose, effect, and proper means of interpreting and amending it, including whether the Justices and others sworn to uphold it may amend it based upon their own personal subjective feelings and desires.
The liberals have eviscerated the Tenth and most of the Ninth Amendments by saying that they are "merely declaratory." The Framers said exactly the same thing about the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth etc.which they had originally considered unnecessary and feared that they owuld lbe misconstrued as negating other rights, which is why the Ninth and Tenth were added along with them, so tht argument fails.
Some of our more liberal recent and current Justices, including Kennedy who is the determining swing vote on many cases today, just as Roberts was in 1937, were chosen by purportely conservative Republicans. In one recent case, President, and former Professor of Constitutional Law Obama said afterward that he agreed with the result reached, if not the rationale used, by the conservatives rahter than hte one reached by the liberal majority. He did not mention that, on politial gorunds, he had voted agianst confirming two of the justices who reached the result he said would have been correct in that case. . The Court and all its Justices should protect the politically powerless from popular abuses but should be above politics. Even the Court's opinions refer to the other two as the "poitial" branches, and this was the clear intent of the Founders and Framers, across the spectrum from Hamilton to Jefferson etc.
Excellent research.
Unfortunately, the suppposedly conservativer Rehnquist court, and the "conservtive" Justices thereupon, reaffirmed Wickard v. Filburn in the Raich case dealing wiht California marijuana laws, after two cases where they said the federal Congress had overstepped its bounds. Even Bork has written that there probably is nothing the Court will not allow the federal govenrment to do now. They cqan use the so-called "butterfly effect" theory, too, to reach anything, and the liberal five recently cited their own subjective personal feelings as the ultimate source of Constitutional law, overriding text, original intent, or any other principled theory. It would take a new set of Constitutional amendments to get back toward, not to, anything like the original intent accepted across the board until the infamouis "switch in time that saved nine" in 197 thaqt relied solely upon one brief passage by Hamilton out of context and not one prior opinion of the Court which, in order to uphold Social Security, etc., converted us from a federal government of defined and limited functions and powers to one of virtually unlimited and undefined powers, ie. a dictatorship. At the samde time, a recent U. S. Court of Appeals case has struck down Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as unconstitutional because some big campaign contributors don't like it and not all the infinite variety of unfair discrimination by states under it were described and documented within the text of the law, always an impossible process. So a small family farm can be regimented but not a big company or arm of government. Go figure.
Excellent rebuttal. Sometimes SD's headlines on these pieces are misleading until you dig, but this whole article falls way short of usual sourcing and basic logic.
To get a valid comparison, you would likely hve to compare those who rely only on FOX News with those who rely only on CBS News, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc.
I watch FOX News and commentary. I also watch and follow other sources, including NY Times (NYT) and Washington Post (WaqPo) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorials and other free content on line. Part of my job my last year of law school was to digest and abstract NYT. WaPo, and about a dozen other mostly liberal papers daily, plus all legal sources, for articles on race relations for a Ford Foundation funded entity. NYT ran one article on a large demonstration that would have been my job to cover, and visible form my residence or office, that was never promoted and simply never happened. During the Korean war, as a ham radio fan, I would catch US commercial, Voice of America, and then BBC, Swiss, Soviet, and Bulgarian English broadcasts, etc. Bulgaria interested me because, part of the Soviet empire, they often diverged pointedly from Soviet propaganda. Both sides slanted the figures in the war news and I came to rely upon Swiss etc. numbers. They didn't have FOX but, when I was away at Vanderbilt and wnqted first news on who won a special election for U. S. Senate in Texas, won by conservaive Republivcan John Tower, my choice as a Texas resident and absentee voter, I knew that if he had won the "mainstream" would play itdown so went to commentator Paul Hnarvey's broadcast, correctly predicting he would carry the story of Tower's win. FOX covers some significant sotries that the "mainstream" left-leaning media don't. You can build a solid conservative case even out of te liberal leaning WaPo if you dig for facts and figures.
The left came unglued when Sarah Palin, who, with her advisers, sometimes makes errors in speeches--like the day the news admitted we had lost about 100 in Viet Nam and LBJ and the media talked about the lowest "peacetime" unemployment rate in history--spoke of "death panels" under the AACA, but NYT columnist and economist Paul Krugman had to admit that she was right and you don't often see that documented admission.
I have a B.A. in economics and an earned doctorate (J.D.) in law, my wife3 has her B.A. and part of an M.A., I know people who work for the power company, and had to go through my state senator just to get anybody with the leading power company I was with to talk to me, and after their executive and I went over my family's electic power usage, they couildn't or wouldn't figurte out which of their own plans, much less competitors' to recommend for us, so how could I do that calculation? It's set up to give you the illusion of choice when you are really forced ot make a guess that will likely hot work out to your best.
This reaches its hieght with Medicare Part D drug plans in which the fist step is to list all thd medical problems you and you wife will have next year and the cost of whatever prescription medications will be prescribed for them. The day after your opportunity to choose or change expires, i.e., the day the plan year starts, the insurance company you chose has the absolute right to change the "formulary" and all the terms they offered to get you to sign upwith them instead of a competitor. The on-line federal list of companies that serve your locality is grossly wrong, adding another blind so-called "choice" to this game.
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I believe, contrary to many people including many Constitutional originalists, that broad rights of privacy are essential to liberty and thus among the unenumerated, God-given, unenumerated fundamental rights of individuals mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as well as being more explicitly covered in the Fourth Amendment, to the U. S. Constitution. However, I have some hard questions when people start talking about rights of privacy in connection with driving while intoxicated on alcohol, drugs, substances, or any combination thereof. I have been actively involved in lobbying and campaigning for certain laws protecting real rights of privacy, including medical and psychological privacy, and in litigation over rights of privacy and invasions thereof. How is a measurement of alcohol level taken in, and by a device you know is installed in, your own car an invasion of your privacy? For that matter, since when is driving a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, much less doing so when your being impaired by alcohol or other drugs is very likely to endanger the lives and safety of other people as well as their property, a private act, or an act in or concerning which you would have any reasonable expectation or right of privacy? It also totally escapes me how some people insist vehemently that announced cameras that catch people running red lights or otherwise dangerously violating traffic laws while operating a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, where violations endanger lives and property, implicates much less violates any identifiable, much less arguable, right of privacy.
The fellow came with the RIAA baggage when President Obama chose him for his present high-level job in the White House. Of course he's going to side with the RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry and intellectual property holders. So, I believe, would any Solicitor General under a Republican administration. The Solicitor General argues in the Supreme Court but the Attorney General and President essentially tell him which side to support.
One of several problems with the alleged rise of the alleged cognitive elite, i.e., college graduates and incomes, is that measuring this alleged rise by mean average gross income fails to alert one to several problems. I have 97th percentile verbal ability scores as a mature adult, down from 99 /4th percentile as a high school senior when that made me a National Merit Scholarship finalist. I only have one earned doctorate, from one of our leading universities generally ranked near the top in my field. I know a lot of other people with bachelors’ and advanced degrees. Like an awful lot of the rest of the people I know, an awful lot of those I know with high intelligence, degrees, including advanced degrees in math, physics, and other fields supposedly in demand, and ambition, are now, and likely will remain, unemployed or terribly under-employed.
Recently published data suggests something that a lot of us had suspected: A huge percentage of college students don’t actually learn anything, or much of anything, in college. Thus, using college graduation as a measure of the “cognitive elite” is ludicrous.
As for cognitive elites, let’s face it, the Chinese and a couple dozen other countries, some of which you probably couldn’t name and which we used to think of as poor, benighted, Third World, etc., outrank us not only in college and advanced degree enrollment and graduation, but in English as well as math. Unless you believe in racial theories of intelligence, and I don’t, something is wrong. I have hired a number of high school seniors, and others, whose IQ scores, for example—a very imperfect measure of what one can be expected to do with their brain in real life in my view—are well above average, who, like far too many, from native-born, English-speaking homes, have been allowed to get to that point without becoming fluent in spoken and written English, or learning to balance a checkbook much less excel in higher math and computers.
This article does note that today it can take someone, especially someone not born with a silver spoon, to age forty (40) just to break even after accounting for the opportunity and education costs to get there. That’s way too old, beyond the best child-bearing years, for example, and at a point where, laws to the contrary notwithstanding in tough times, you have probably already been told, as I was at 38 “You’re too --- ---- old.” Lots of luck if you’re 50 or 55 and get laid off in the new economy.
There are an awful lot of our cognitive elite, many of whom I know, who can’t find a job using their education or much of it, or which pays enough to cover their debts and other cash and opportunity costs of higher education. I knew one bright, motivated individual just shy of finishing his dissertation and boards for his Ph.D. in math and physics who taught one computer course at the state university here but had to turn to roofing to make a living. I know two more Ph.D. candidates, one in math, who found the best job they could get was teaching English in China. Computer and defense contract people I knew who were making $80,000.00 to $100,000.00 have found themselves commuting halfway across the country for temporary jobs at a fraction of their former salaries, when, after stints loading boxcars for minimum wage, they can find anything using their cognitive abilities, which is resulting in bankruptcies, family breakdowns, suicide attempts and suicides in these families, etc.
My primary abilities are verbal rather than in math, and real incomes for most of those in my field, even if, like me, you graduated in the upper third of a selective class from a top university at the graduate level have not kept pace for a generation, and are now dropping for the handful at the top whose employers have and their clients, whose incomes were essentially insulated from any real broad market. I remember when the same thing happened to the aerospace engineers, etc. Ther
Right!
Amen!
I'm not p;ostingthis anonymously, but the right to do so goes back deep into American history, including the authors of the Federalist papers supporting ratification of hte Constitution publishing under the pseudonym "Publius," and I sometimes do post anonymously, usually where identifying myself would tend to identify someone else whose privacy I have a legal or moral duty to protect, or where there may be a danger of retaliation. I have several questions about this report and the proposal it describes. First, which of the big companies with bought and paid for political pull would get the profitable contract? What will protect us against such "trusted ID" being linked toour medical and other records? Who decides who is to be "trusted?" I can't get anybody at Homeland Security and its TSA to issue me a Trusted Flyer ID or even tell either my Senator orme me why not or whether or not I can get on a plane. As for the distinction between State and Federal ID cards, that has been erased by the feds using the "spending power" to compel the states to conform to their plan for uniformity and access. I just went through a months-long, expensive effort before getting my expired state ID reissued. My birth certificate lists neither a father nor a mother, The CIA absurdly and falsely had me on a list of Soviet spies and sympathizers and lied to my Senator and me about this for years under both parties. I would want a whole lot more and verifiable information before trusting the federal government or anyone in it with any more data and power.
This work is finally done and this study published in 2011, after this study, consisting of all of twelve (12) alleged cases, was published in 1998, twelve (12) years ago, years after the original journal withdrew its sponsorship, after court proceedings based upon and challenging this study were long over, and after countless studies failed to reproduce the results and otherwise called this into question. We have seen some newer studies into the cause or causes of autism but, as of now, still don't know what causes it, how to prevent it, etc. I'm 72. This is said to affect a lot of individuals, I've seen figures from one in 158 to one in 142, and I know people with it, and others who have studied it, in recent years, but never saw or heard of anyone with these symptoms when I was in school. If they redefine it in the DSM-V, we'll never decipher the results. It's not the only terrifying medical problem, back to polio in the early fifties. for the cause or transmission of which I have seen people fervently committed to theories. This isn't in my expertise, though evidence is, and I don't know.
in practice, peer review is only a weak pre-screening process that often rejects good papers and accepts bad work." I knew it! I managed to get through statistics in college but statistics, and math, are not my strong suit. Nevertheless, the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and silicone breast implant companies persuaded the Supreme Court to require publication in the right journals and peer review before accepting any new scientific, or non-scientific expert, work as evidence. It took years even with that requirement before somebody figured out that two different batches of bullets might match up just as though they had come from the same melt of metal. The rub is that nobody is ever going to do meaningful "peer review" on the odds for and against many events until they start costing big businesses and their insurers big bucks so it becomes important, and profitable, to prove that you can't prove what's going on. The Supreme Court of Texas took this one step farther, in relation to something that does require very, very careful expert work, and held that, since there were no experts yet who they recognized in a subject, there would be no way to ever become one. Some things you end up trying to prove or defend against in court didn't happen enough times to make statistics and statistical significance significant, but that proves nothing. By the way, who oversees who is selected to review these articles. This author, who seems to be a real expert in some areas, reveals the truth, that not all these human reviewers are much good. Is anybody really surprised?
As a retired lawyer, I agree with you and the Ohio court. They already have the phone in custody without a warrant, ok. Your cell phone or laptop is the modern equivalent of the Founders' roll-top desk and "papers and effects." Get a warrant. Considering how easy that is in practice, and how few applications are ever actually turned down, by the non-lawyer JP, municipal judge, or mayor who qualify as a "detached and neutral magistrate," why ever not apply. Now the police here let the thief, already on probation, walk out of jail with my wife's engagement ring, identified from a fax, before it reached them from here in the next town. What, precisely, besides the kind of fishing expedition warrants were designed to avoid, would the police be looking for if they arrested you, as they can, without a warrant, for not wearing your seat belt, jaywalking, or the ever-popular broken taillight or dirty or misplaced license plate, as the Texas and U. S. Supreme Court have held justifies an arrest though the "crime" carries no jail time after conviction. Hey, in my law practice, I had two official arrest reports that said the defendant was arrested for being in a "high crime and drug-dealing area," that just happened to be the sidewalk in front of the police station," among other such slim grounds. Don't kid yourself that you, your wife, or your teenage daughter have nothing to fear from erosion of the Fourth Amendment and other Constitutional guarantees because you are law-abiding citizens. "They came for the Jews and I wasn't a Jew, . . . then they came for me . . ." is all too true. I know several people arrested because of theft of their identities, etc. "Driving While Black" will get you arrested and hassled. Information on your phone or computer that can cause an innocent person trouble can include having been called, wrong number or otherwise, by a "known criminal," evidence of an unpopular belief or association, etc. I’m pro-life, but calling an abortion provider or any other provider of physical or mental health services is supposed to be private and confidential. Good luck if the combination or password you hid in your phone matches the safe that was rifled at your doctor’s office. Have you called Crimestoppers, Child Protective Services, the Medicare Fraud Hot Line, or the person at the local paper who is publishing a series of articles on problems in the local police department? If not, are you prepared to be accused of misprision of a felony for not reporting something someone may decide that you knew or had good reason to believe relating to certain crimes? Have you ever tried, or needed, to prove that you did not commit a crime?
Chemical Rubber Company, CRC, now that takes me way back to buying the CRC tables book when starting four years of elective math in junior high and high school about 1953. Also my older brother's first good K & E slide rule. I got to college and discovered, to my horror, that higher math was not my thing, Computer literacy was being taken down to a big old-fashioned double-glass clean computer room, with tubes, wires, and punch cards, and being told "That's a computer. It thinks in ones and zeroes. DON'T GO IN THERE!" One of my classmates went on to MIT, as I had hoped to do, and figured in the use of computers to transform his chosen industry. I moved into law. Did some work regarding introduction ofr early word processors in law office but didn't even get a computer, including the big decision whether to splurge on the large 40 MB hard drive, and start trying to learn what I could about it until the late eighties. I remember reading BYTE. Some I could understand, some I never did. With the aid of some friends, I got to the point where I could do a lot of things in DOS using simple instructions, batch files, etc. Forced to "migrate" as they called it, to Windows 95, which necessitated a major upgrade, some time after my secretary had made that change as some essential programs no longer came in DOS, I have never yet found a book I can read, given my uncorrectable vision limitation and the smaller and smaller, and compressed, type used, or anywhere, including the computer science department at the state university here, which triggered the book type size etc. problem, via which I have been able to learn to do in any language in Windows some of the things I could do in DOS 5.0, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, etc.. Some oft he new and improved legal programs to keep up with amendments in the Bankruptcy Code, etc., were awful both from a legal and word processing, and a computing, standpoint. I managed to make the transition from WP 5.1 to Word but you have to dig for keyboard macros, operators, etc. and Word insists I want to do things nobody would be likely to do. I wish somebody would come up with a good on-line site that assumes you just got here from the dark side of the moon and were not a math person but had a little sense and were picking up bits and pieces, and that the first thing you might need to do would be to create some data lists, and then use those in designing a series of documents and some programs based upon forms, rules of court that sometimes measure from different points, etc. There really ought to be ways for someone without the math needed for an advanced degree in computer science or programming to create programs that would do basic things, some of which I know are needed in thousands of small ot medium sized legal and other offices, that either are wildly beyond their price range, would take a full-time year's work to learn, or both, or just don't do right, i.e. the way we rather than math majors do things. Everybody else I know over the age of eight knows how to hack into things I can't get into, too. One guy in our jail somehow managed to get advanced news, he said on line, of a 41 defendant child porn rid that the local authorities were not even supposed to know about, I thought he was bluffing until the story broke with that number, and the FBI won't tell me anything about it, including why and how the open public records of those 41 arrests somehow disappeared after the first news stories. I'm not interested in most felonies but need to be abel to track down stories that don't show up in a typical Google search, and protect myself from bad hackers etc. Maybe that's a niche this new start-up using the old BYTE name could fill. Hope it doesn't turn out likie some other good old magazines that either never caught on again or the new iteration was filled with a bunch of junk.
Dogs can do some things in interactions with humans that we humans can not do or do as well. Dogs can learn to anticipate different types of epileptic seizures earlier and better than the individual can, or when the individual has no reliable aura to alert her to an impending seizure. too. How many humans do you know who can tell in advance, as dogs have been trained to do, when their master or mistress is about to have a strong emotional reaction, including but not limited to a flashback, rooted in some traumatic events earlier in life before she and the dog met, know when to hide because her master is reacting to such earlier events and neither the dog nor anyone else can get through, which can be dangerous for everyone, or when, with expert help, the mistress is returning to her present, adult state and the dog's presence is again helpful, needed, etc. Paralyzed Veterans of America has backed some research into using service dogs for vets with this common condition, reported even by the most highly decorated veteran of World War II when it was called battle fatigue. This research has also been extended to and verified among survivors of child and adult sexual assault, and service dogs have been properly certified for this. My law practice, etc., unexpectedly came to deal with an awful lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, some of whom I met as children and some only as adults, in diverse matters, and one dog somehow became able to identify a survivor of such horrific child abuse, as an adult, with an amazing reliability I saw repeated, just like a trained bird dog responding to a covey of quail, etc. I think I could have qualified this dog as an expert and got a court to admit such evidence within the standards laid down by the highest federal and state courts.
You got this right. What nobody has worked with here, that should have been done before the Supreme Court weighed in without such necessary evidence using its own standards, is how this interplays with the Court's misbegotten ruling that "virtual" child pornography depicting severe abuse [as they held earlier regarding commercial nude lap dancing, etc.] is protected by the First Amendment,no matter how indistinguishable from real, un-retouched photographs of real chnildren, though they concede that real child porn is not. By the way, will some of you actual or alleged evolutionary biologists please explain how, in current evolutionary theory, the ability to distinguish something that, as a matter of invention and refinement, would not have existed, much less been an existential problem, 150 years ago, from another picture painted or otherwise produced, much less from a living being, would have had any occasion to develop at all, much less how it could and would have developed during this short time frame since invention of modern photography, etc.?
Thanks. Well said. I am a retired lawyer who has seen it all. Unfortunately, there are lawyers, judges, and legally-trained other elected officials palmed off on us by both parties, etc., who, like some of the auto mechanics, bankers, computer people, plumbers, and doctors, etc. I know, I know well enough that I would not trust them.
Anyone who posts "Anyone who disagrees with me . . . is just a part of the problem." would appear to be a very insecure fool. There is a very real, relevant, and significant distinction between nonfiction, and fiction fairly dealing with the problem, of incest, rape, suh crimes against children, etc., and writings glofifying this and inviting perverts to wallow in it. As for the Bible references, David and his immediate and extended family, etc., the next poster after you deals with that properly, showing that you have misinterpreted or misquoted, and misapplied, the Biblical accounts of such crimes and the lasting damage they cause.
This comment makes sense. Legitimate note-taking etc. on computer would have helped me. There always seem to be "students" who ruin freedom for everyone else by provoking more and more detailed regulations, which are not the best way to run college or the world. Never mind sitting in the back of the classroom. Don't go to class. Just pay full tuition (no scholarships for you unless you study and go to class and participate), party, binge, turn in your papers (anti-cribbing software is in place), pass the final, have all these facts on your transcript, and go get and perform well at a good job where they actually expect you to get work done right. Now, after having acquired one earned doctorate and worked for years, I believe in liberal break, napping, etc., because it often contributes to performance. But going to class and playing games, texting or emailing, etc., is discourteous to faculty and other students, and raises grave questions about your character and motivation. Why go to cvollege to do that? The Texas Legislature wound up disabling games etc. on state-issue computers intended to be used for work by our elected legislators. That actually interfered with using them to check facts, other states version of laws, etc.
If you really believe that you and yours will always succeed by being smarter, getting better grades, working harder, and be able to pay for all your own and your family's medical needs, you indeed are suffering delusions of meritocracy or whatever. I used to believe that stuff too. Then I completed my formal education and realized that the correlation between intelligence, education, hard work, etc., and wealth or income was largely a myth, especially when you started dealing with health care issues. The Founders of this nation noted in their writings that their descendants would be scattered economically, long before modern genetic research, not to mention unemployment statistics, confirmed this fact. If you're so rich, why aren't you smart? The subject of the original blog post here did something I consider incredibly foolish, etc., but the answer is to save his life, fix him up, and then charge him for the cost of his emergency and later care, as well as any damages to drivers trying to avoid him, etc. That makes both better economic and general sense. Don't ask me why people do things like this, or other life-endangering stunts.
I'm a retired Texas lawyer with a lot of child abuse experience, and interest and some experience in privacy law, but don't know Michigan law. In Texas, and most other states, if anyone acquires credible information giving reasonable cause to believe that a child has been, is being, or is in real danger of being abused or neglected, they have a legal duty to report this to Child Protective Services, and maybe to take some other actions to protect the child. Failure to do so is both a tort, giving rise to a claim for civil damages, and a crime. Under what one commentator has called the "discrete indiscretions rule," the fact that a parent is having an affair is normally not relevant, and thus not admissible, until it is proven that the child knew what was going on and was upset and harmed by it. Just as, here, contrary to a lot of old tales, the appellate courts have held that it is still burglary whether the door is locked or not, just as reaching into the back of the sheriff's pickup truck and stealing his case of beer is burglary of a vehicle, the fact that the passwords were physically accessible or easily guessed would appear to be irrelevant. Reading someone else's Email, and particularly reading it and revealing its contents to a third party, is illegal. Under the Federal Communications Act, at 49 U.S.C. 405, it has long been illegal to use or forward the substance even of a ham or commercial point to point radio message that it is technically easy and legal to listen to. I have been involved in divorce and child custody, etc., cases in which, for example, the husband accepted his estranged wife's offer, while the divorce was pending, to come clean his house. She found porn on paper and on what had been their computer, files obviously not hers. The court admitted the evidence and the husband lost custody as an explicitly stated result. No appeal so no definitive ruling binding in other cases. I discovered, through credible third parties, credible evidence that a client had been raped by her father. Actually there was more than one such case and client, in some of which the client herself did, and in some of which she did not, ever tell me herself. Some such apparent abusers were office holders (both parties) and other high muckity-mucks with political influence. The law requires me to report this but the State Bar advised me that doing so would violate one or more of their Disciplinary Rules. Wrong, as statutes control over rules, but what can I do? Not exactly on point, but interesting: Lawyer client of mine is having an affair. He switches his office phone from an answering service to his home after five. Wife answers. Paramour, not alerted to the change, tells the wife, who she thinks is the answering service, a message for the lawyer rescheduling their secret rendezvous. Admitted into evidence in very expensive divorce case. I wouldn't bet a nickel how this case will turn out, but you can bet the ranch that the child will get lost in the beaurocratic shuffle and get hurt. .
I've only got one degree in economics, plus a J.D. in law. I live under what passes for deregulation and competition in Texas. I'm a fan, and have actually read, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, etc., not to mention his works on ethics, and diverse others' writings on such subjects as well. . I defy anyone to make an intelligent and informed choice between electric utility provides in Texas, or Medicare Part D prescription drug plans mandated by federal law, etc I had to go through my state senator's office just to get the name and number of anyone with the oldest and leading electric provider that I could talk to when necessary. Nobody, including their executive or the state public utility commission, could or would advise me which plan of theirs, much less thneir competitors', would be best for us gienour historical usage and any other available data. The federally mandated annual Medicare Part D provider selection starts with your hving to predict what will happen and what drugs will be prescribe for youfor those conditions or events in the next yar, il.e., requires you to predict the future accurately at a very detialed level tht no casinowould take a bet on. In Smith's classic, working, free market model, you would have many makers nad sellers, easy entry, no "pricing poer" and no power to "drive down the cost," and aouit the second ting my acquaintances learned in business school was never to go into any industry or business with any of those characteristics. The Consumer Credit Commissioner tells me nobody regulates Dell Financial or its lies and abuses. For that matter, nobody from locl law enforcement through hte state and federal DEA and White House Drug Czar under either the Republicans or the Democrats would do anything about an admittedly wide-open crack cocaine dealership on this block within a drug-free zone across the street from a state university and within a few blocks of two police stations, either. Considering the lobbying money and clout already used before the new federal consumer protection agency even gets staffed and opened, would anybody bet that it will be effective, either?
How dare you make such awfully scandalous allegations and give such aid and comfort to our enemies? Don't you realize that telling the truth, especially truth that the enemy and everyone else already knows becuase much of this has been published before, maybe without YouTuber video, violates, but commercial nude lap dancing is protected by, the First Amendment? Like a lot of the rest of the huge amounts of money shoveled to politically connected hogs by the Homeland Security Department, with the connivance of Congresses, under both parties, this is pure politics. Come, now, arrests and convictions are public record, and can you or Janet Napolitano at HS or Pistole at TSA identify one (1) single terrorist TSA has arested before they got, and prevented from getting onto, a plane or other target area? Medieval looking fire axes have been on planes since I started flying over fifty years ago, so I presume any real terrorist knows about them. Ditto the comparably lax security around unskilled plane cleaners, loaders, and other ground personnel than pilots we entrust with the plane itself and or lives, meaning that his being allowd to carry a pistol after training raises his danger level to anyone except a terrorist or other violent assailant by about the same fraction of a percent as his carrying aq Twinkie. I'm a retired lawyer and every once in awhile somebody needs to point out that the legal definition of a "deadly weapon" quite naturally and properly starts with the word "anything." If I wanted to, I could probably still get the one blade out of a disposable razor that an inmate here got through jail and courthouse security and used to cut his lawyer's throat through. Have you seen the military manual suggesting using a BIC pen and other such unconventional weapons? TSA refuses to tell my U. S. Senator or me whether or not I am on their "no fly" list or am free to fly despite, for example, a congenital condition that is probable cause for a warrantless arrest here and in most jurisdictions, but people who have already used bombs against the Pentagon and other American targets have offices in and passes into the White House. The unpleasant fact is that we're over-reacting to terrorism, including shoe bombers, etc., just exactly the way Rules for Radicals, by Obama's late mentor Saul Alinsky, and other sources tell terrorists to goad the authorities into doing. They're costing us more in largely useless security theater than they could wiht a reasl attack. Of course, under Bush's people, HS and TSA pushed aluminum foil and duct tape as security, too.
Thee has long been a rule or rules against even taking a sound recorder into a federal and some state courthouses, etc. Having no place to leave mine when I arrived in another district and town by air and publiv ground transportation, I got into an argument in which I told someone I thought was a rent-a-guard tha didn't think an honest fellow would be afraid of a recorder. Turned out to be a federal judge. Tense moments. Caught flack for bringing one, with a secured prerecorded tape containing evidence the judge had asked me to bring, with the knockouts out to prevent recording over it, etc., to another courtroom. There is a rule permitting you to record certain creditors' meetings in bankruptcy unless someone hires a court reporter in which event you must turn it off nd buy a n expensive copy from the reporter if you need the info. A lot of these rules are to protect the monopoly incomes of court reporters. One problem would be if you shot video of an undercover officer that ld to his cover being blown and possible injury or death, but you would n[t have that situation in the average police-citizen interaction one would be likely to want to record.
Then why is it a felony to recklessly touch an officer but only a misdemeanor for an officer or guard to, among other things, have sex, which couldn't possibly be consensual, with an underage kid in juvenile detention or juvenile prison, under Texas law, after two successive scandals involving both officers and officials that the Texas Rangers had to come in and break up, one under the current Republican governor and one under a former Democratic governor and legislature, and why wasn't this outrage corrected after the second of thee led to some other changes in the law? I think I know, but attorney-client and other privileged and confidential relationships and communications inhibit my saying it publicly.. Compare a lot of the penalties for crimes committed by politicians etc. and for strikingly similar ones committed by other people.
Oh, yes, corporations really are actually people. The Supreme Court has said so since very shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted over a century ago, and, as you must realize, and we all must accept, the Supreme Court "is not final because it is infallible, it is infallible because its decisions are final." That's why it took three quarters of a century to correct its decision upholding so-called "separate but equal" despite Harlan the Elder's prescient dissent in that case and overwhelming evidence that separate never was, never was intended to be, and never would be equal. There is now a bitter and deeply divisive disagreement about the intent, purpose, effect, and proper means of interpreting and amending it, including whether the Justices and others sworn to uphold it may amend it based upon their own personal subjective feelings and desires. The liberals have eviscerated the Tenth and most of the Ninth Amendments by saying that they are "merely declaratory." The Framers said exactly the same thing about the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth etc.which they had originally considered unnecessary and feared that they owuld lbe misconstrued as negating other rights, which is why the Ninth and Tenth were added along with them, so tht argument fails. Some of our more liberal recent and current Justices, including Kennedy who is the determining swing vote on many cases today, just as Roberts was in 1937, were chosen by purportely conservative Republicans. In one recent case, President, and former Professor of Constitutional Law Obama said afterward that he agreed with the result reached, if not the rationale used, by the conservatives rahter than hte one reached by the liberal majority. He did not mention that, on politial gorunds, he had voted agianst confirming two of the justices who reached the result he said would have been correct in that case. . The Court and all its Justices should protect the politically powerless from popular abuses but should be above politics. Even the Court's opinions refer to the other two as the "poitial" branches, and this was the clear intent of the Founders and Framers, across the spectrum from Hamilton to Jefferson etc.
Excellent research. Unfortunately, the suppposedly conservativer Rehnquist court, and the "conservtive" Justices thereupon, reaffirmed Wickard v. Filburn in the Raich case dealing wiht California marijuana laws, after two cases where they said the federal Congress had overstepped its bounds. Even Bork has written that there probably is nothing the Court will not allow the federal govenrment to do now. They cqan use the so-called "butterfly effect" theory, too, to reach anything, and the liberal five recently cited their own subjective personal feelings as the ultimate source of Constitutional law, overriding text, original intent, or any other principled theory. It would take a new set of Constitutional amendments to get back toward, not to, anything like the original intent accepted across the board until the infamouis "switch in time that saved nine" in 197 thaqt relied solely upon one brief passage by Hamilton out of context and not one prior opinion of the Court which, in order to uphold Social Security, etc., converted us from a federal government of defined and limited functions and powers to one of virtually unlimited and undefined powers, ie. a dictatorship. At the samde time, a recent U. S. Court of Appeals case has struck down Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as unconstitutional because some big campaign contributors don't like it and not all the infinite variety of unfair discrimination by states under it were described and documented within the text of the law, always an impossible process. So a small family farm can be regimented but not a big company or arm of government. Go figure.
Excellent rebuttal. Sometimes SD's headlines on these pieces are misleading until you dig, but this whole article falls way short of usual sourcing and basic logic. To get a valid comparison, you would likely hve to compare those who rely only on FOX News with those who rely only on CBS News, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. I watch FOX News and commentary. I also watch and follow other sources, including NY Times (NYT) and Washington Post (WaqPo) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorials and other free content on line. Part of my job my last year of law school was to digest and abstract NYT. WaPo, and about a dozen other mostly liberal papers daily, plus all legal sources, for articles on race relations for a Ford Foundation funded entity. NYT ran one article on a large demonstration that would have been my job to cover, and visible form my residence or office, that was never promoted and simply never happened. During the Korean war, as a ham radio fan, I would catch US commercial, Voice of America, and then BBC, Swiss, Soviet, and Bulgarian English broadcasts, etc. Bulgaria interested me because, part of the Soviet empire, they often diverged pointedly from Soviet propaganda. Both sides slanted the figures in the war news and I came to rely upon Swiss etc. numbers. They didn't have FOX but, when I was away at Vanderbilt and wnqted first news on who won a special election for U. S. Senate in Texas, won by conservaive Republivcan John Tower, my choice as a Texas resident and absentee voter, I knew that if he had won the "mainstream" would play itdown so went to commentator Paul Hnarvey's broadcast, correctly predicting he would carry the story of Tower's win. FOX covers some significant sotries that the "mainstream" left-leaning media don't. You can build a solid conservative case even out of te liberal leaning WaPo if you dig for facts and figures. The left came unglued when Sarah Palin, who, with her advisers, sometimes makes errors in speeches--like the day the news admitted we had lost about 100 in Viet Nam and LBJ and the media talked about the lowest "peacetime" unemployment rate in history--spoke of "death panels" under the AACA, but NYT columnist and economist Paul Krugman had to admit that she was right and you don't often see that documented admission.
I have a B.A. in economics and an earned doctorate (J.D.) in law, my wife3 has her B.A. and part of an M.A., I know people who work for the power company, and had to go through my state senator just to get anybody with the leading power company I was with to talk to me, and after their executive and I went over my family's electic power usage, they couildn't or wouldn't figurte out which of their own plans, much less competitors' to recommend for us, so how could I do that calculation? It's set up to give you the illusion of choice when you are really forced ot make a guess that will likely hot work out to your best. This reaches its hieght with Medicare Part D drug plans in which the fist step is to list all thd medical problems you and you wife will have next year and the cost of whatever prescription medications will be prescribed for them. The day after your opportunity to choose or change expires, i.e., the day the plan year starts, the insurance company you chose has the absolute right to change the "formulary" and all the terms they offered to get you to sign upwith them instead of a competitor. The on-line federal list of companies that serve your locality is grossly wrong, adding another blind so-called "choice" to this game.